Meet the AI Mom Assistant With a Grocery List

Watch more: Digital Shift With AI-Empowered Mom’s Sarah Dooley

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become synonymous with workplace productivity, helping employees summarize meetings, write code and automate repetitive tasks. But Sarah Dooley believes one of AI’s most important consumer applications is emerging somewhere much closer to home.

Families are beginning to use AI to manage the invisible work that keeps households running, from planning meals and organizing calendars to researching purchases and managing budgets. “The mental load is really all of that invisible labor or ghost labor,” Dooley, founder of AI-Empowered Mom, told PYMNTS. “The cognitive labor that has to happen to keep a household running.”

That everyday administrative work, she said, presents one of AI’s earliest opportunities to reduce friction in consumers’ lives. As families become more comfortable using AI to handle routine tasks, the experience could also shape how much trust they are willing to place in the technology for larger financial decisions.

AI Reduces the Household Mental Load

Dooley founded AI-Empowered Mom after discovering that many of the AI productivity techniques she had used during her career in technology consulting could also simplify family life. What began as informal AI literacy sessions around her dining room table has evolved into a business focused on helping parents use AI to reduce the cognitive burden of managing a household.

That burden extends well beyond chores. It includes anticipating needs, coordinating schedules, managing budgets, researching purchases and keeping family life organized. Dooley said much of that work is invisible despite consuming significant time and mental energy.

Those recurring responsibilities inspired Em, AI-Empowered Mom’s AI assistant, which is currently in beta testing. The tool helps families plan meals, organize calendars, manage household reminders and research products before making purchasing decisions. Rather than replacing people, Dooley sees AI as creating more space for the parts of family life that require human judgment and connection.

“I hope that just in the same way that I’m working hard to create more space for humanity in my life, that companies will do that,” she said.

Consumer Trust Will Determine AI Adoption

As AI becomes more capable, Dooley believes the challenge is shifting from technical performance to consumer trust.

She deliberately teaches her children to think of AI as “a thinking machine” rather than a companion. “It can be an assistant or something that helps us, but it’s not a part of our family. It’s not our friend,” she said.

She believes businesses should take a similar approach by being transparent about where AI is used and how it contributes to decision making.

“Being very open and honest about where they’re using AI and why, embedding in that transparency, being clear about how it’s used, especially when it comes to decision making, is one of the ways that they can keep those relationships that are most dear,” she said.

Dooley also argued that businesses, particularly financial institutions, should rethink who they design products for. While most digital financial services focus on individuals, many financial decisions are made at the household level.

“I think financial institutions can stand to really benefit from thinking more broadly about the family instead of just the individual,” she said.

Banks and FinTechs Hold the Trust Advantage in Consumer AI

Even as AI becomes more integrated into everyday family life, Dooley believes consumers are still reluctant to delegate financial authority to software.

“There is a big trust deficit that AI is gonna have to make up before we really hand over the wallet or the purse strings and let AI make those purchase decisions,” she said.

That trust gap creates an opening for companies that already have long-standing relationships with consumers. Rather than expecting families to rely on unfamiliar AI platforms for financial guidance, Dooley believes banks and FinTechs are well positioned to introduce AI through services customers already use and trust.

“I do think there’s a great opportunity for banks and FinTechs that already have trusted relationships to embed AI capabilities, and I think that’s where families will go first,” she said.

For Dooley, AI’s long-term success will depend less on how sophisticated the technology becomes than on whether it helps people solve real problems while earning consumers’ trust along the way.

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