Today’s Features:

Hearth: household display to distribute the family workload.
Maple: family organizational software.
Ohai, Hero: AI household assistant.
Faye: marketplace for family advisors.
Dupe, Phia: tool for finding duplicates or environmentally conscious shopping.

The Care Economy: AI for the ‘Real’ Work

(Every house needs their own Workspace)

Workplace productivity companies are some of the most used and loved applications out there: Slack, Superhuman, Notion, Google Workspace — the list goes on. The best of them marry some form of single player utility with multiplayer collaboration in the service of getting more stuff done. But as we find ourselves sandwiched between two major holiday seasons before the end of the year, we couldn’t help but realize: all of these tools are for ‘work’ — narrowly defined as the activities done to earn money. But what about the demanding, invisible labor of running a household and caring for family?

The numbers here are staggering, courtesy of The Holding Co.

This “care economy” is mind-bogglingly large, yet domestic labor remains hard and disproportionately affects women. Governmental support can often be salve for these types of public concerns, but entrepreneurship can also become a meaningful lifeline.

The Household OS: Companies like Hearth are creating an hardware-forward operating system to visualize and interface with the workload in the home.
Seamless Support: Maple helps families organize the most painful touchpoints, like meal planning and scheduling.
Synthetic Help: Apps like Ohai and Hero use AI to simulate having a household assistant.
Human Assistance: Faye makes it easy to access actual human help for tasks.

The Opportunity: Expect a boom in solutions that provide tangible support for caregivers and households, filling the critical gaps in this area that the previous Surgeon General has warned is in crisis. Taken a step further, what would it look like for technology to actually perform the care (i.e. our very own Rosey robots from the Jetsons)? More on that in another feature.

Hunting for the Best Deal: AI as Your Bargain Partner

(A meaty appetizer to agentic commerce)

While in the holiday spirit, let’s talk about commerce. Before users fully trust an AI to “pull the trigger” on a purchase, they need to trust it with simpler tasks: finding the best price. This explains why basic AI deal finder and price comparison tools are already trending, capitalizing on a universal, simple truth: humans love deals.

Apps like Dupe and Phia, which leverage a little bit of AI, are proving that this segment is pulling heat. Both have had recent charting moments in the US App Store, and we expect this isn’t the last we’ll see of them — or others dabbling in this use case — in the rankings.

Dupe was recently charting in the US App Store’s ‘Shopping’ category

So where does this go?

The ‘Bargain Hunt’ Protocol: A chatbot could recommend a product and the best current deal, then be asked to “watch that thing like a hawk,” tracking the price and notifying you when it’s peak buy time.
Earning Trust: This simple step — providing reliable pricing insights and deal alerts — is a crucial step toward building the trust needed for eventual agentic commerce.

The Opportunity: This should be a feature in all chatbots…TODAY.

Today’s article is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood consumer team at GV. Down to kick the tires on any of the above? Hit us up at consumer@gv.com.