I'm a CEO and mom. I built AI agents to help run my household — and save hours every week.

Carrol Chang is the CEO of Andela, which helps companies implement AI by connecting them with technical talent. The wife and mother of three, who lives in New York City, built AI agents using several models to help coordinate her family's schedules and manage school emails. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I was privileged to be in a stable, senior job at a supportive workplace, and it didn't matter because the weight of the calendar management, the sick pickups, being the person that the school or the day care would call, trying to organize holiday gifts for the family, and booking family travel was crushing to me.

A lot of this mental load has been lifted, so I'm grateful. I now have three kids and agents for their sports and school, and for meal planning.

I'd put that commute time on the calendar with enough of a buffer to get there before the game. Then I'd do the same thing on the way home. If there's a conflict with the kids' schedules, you have to reconcile which parent is going to go to which game. Now the agent does it for me, and it saves me so much time.

I'm not an engineer, so I said to AI, "Talk to me like I'm a seventh grader and teach me step-by-step what I should do in order to accomplish this task." Then I had two open browsers, and I followed the instructions. Then, it magically runs.

The agent set up everything and sent me around 60 calendar invites for my kids' soccer games and back, and it was all expertly done. One says, "Uber to game, 23 minutes."

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I remember calculating this, and it was about five to eight hours a week of mental labor. It was calendar management, meal planning, paying our nanny, messaging people to confirm what time to arrive for what, and ordering and unpacking groceries. Now, I probably spend two hours a week doing this stuff and checking on the agents.

I've instructed the agent to only care about events that apply to my kids. My kids go to a bilingual school, with a Spanish track and a Mandarin track. My kids are in the Spanish track, which means I want the agent to ignore the Mandarin events.

The agent will look at whether an email was sent to the listserv or whether it's from an individual. If it's an individual, it has to come through to me because the teacher is emailing my husband and me directly, so we should obviously pay attention.

My husband has also taken on a lot, and we now use an agent for meal planning. There are food allergies we have to take into account. I have a note in my phone with 15 dishes that would rotate every three weeks because we found our thing, and I didn't want to spend any more time thinking about this, so we're just going to do kale sausage pasta and eggplant moussaka.

Now, we don't have to do that because AI suggests new menus that meet everyone's requirements. Then it gives us instructions on what to shop for. These shopping apps have integrated AI, which makes it even easier.