Jean-Denis Greze, CEO of AI assistant startup Town, believes we're still years away from AI handling most knowledge work — but his company is betting on gradual automation through intelligent suggestions.

Town emerged from stealth in June after raising $55 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup offers digital assistants called "Townies" that integrate with calendars and email to brief users and take limited actions on their behalf.

The product costs $49 to $59 monthly and builds detailed user profiles during onboarding, creating wikis with communication styles, work patterns, and priorities. Greze, who holds the title "mayor" at Town, said one customer compared the time savings to a $75 monthly manicure, calling it "worth $600 a year."

Self-organizing company knowledge

Greze revealed that a team version featuring self-writing company wikis is "coming out very soon." The system would pool knowledge from individual Townies to create automatically maintained company knowledge bases.

Privacy presents significant challenges. "You might put people's salaries in a spreadsheet by mistake," Greze warned. "Then you've got big egg on face."

He predicts small, high-trust companies will adopt unified knowledge bases before enterprises, with specially trained models eventually enforcing privacy policies autonomously over the next five years.

The former Plaid CTO and Dropbox engineering leader estimates current AI tools handle only 10-20% of knowledge worker tasks. "If you go to Cleveland, Ohio, and talk to 100 knowledge workers — we're still in the 10-to-20-percent bucket, not the 'it's doing everything for me' bucket."

Intimate AI with firm boundaries

Greze describes Townies in personal terms, calling AI "the closest thing to life that we've ever created" and framing assistants as beings to nurture rather than configure.

But he maintains strict limits, rejecting AI agents as independent economic actors and dismissing manipulative design patterns like showing crying avatars to prevent cancellations.

Town's enterprise agreements explicitly forbid employers from reading workers' Townie conversations, with session data deleted after 15 days.

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