The Peel with Turner Novak Howie: The AI Secretary | Austin Petersmith, Co-founder and CEO
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Oct 9, 2025 Austin Petersmith, Co-founder and CEO of Howie, dives into the challenges of building AI email assistants. He explains why AI is tough to crack, especially with the complexities of scheduling. Austin reveals how a human-in-the-loop approach has improved growth and user retention. He shares the story behind Howie's catchy name and the viral launch video that propelled their success. With insights into brand strategy and the potential for broadening their services, Austin outlines the exciting future for AI in productivity.
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Win By Narrow Focus
- Howie focuses exclusively on scheduling and calendar-related assistant tasks to deliver a reliable experience.
- Narrow scope lets the product be indispensable for users who need external meeting coordination.
Why Scheduling Is Hard
- Email threads contain many red herrings like signatures, timezones, and buried dates that confuse models.
- Scheduling has very low mistake tolerance so small errors quickly destroy user trust.
From Slack Humans To AI Scheduling
- In 2015 Austin and Dave built a human-run Slack bot that handled arbitrary tasks but found it became a call-center scale problem.
- They revisited the idea years later with LLMs and chose scheduling as a tractable narrow starting point.