It’s been a mind-numbingly busy MayCember this year in my house. In the final two months of school, my husband and I have shuttled our two children to 36 combined baseball, soccer and softball games, one cello recital, one piano recital and attended one diorama presentation featuring arctic animals. There are brownies to bake for year-end pool parties, teacher gifts to purchase and shopping for summer birthday party presents that are often being crammed into the final weeks of school. And did I forget the Girl Scouts year end sleep under? Or over? I can’t keep track.

This is definitely where AI could save me - and frankly my small business - lots of time.

It’s coming up in many conversations both in and out of the school yard about how AI could help with parenting. I previously wrote about how the parent app Peanut was using AI to help new mothers. On May 1st, when I attended the “How Creators Win the AI Era” conference hosted by the Slow Creator Fund and Delphi, Varun Shetty , VP of media partnerships at OpenAI, pivoted the conversation to talk about how he is using AI to manage the emails he receives from his children’s school.

“I have two little kids and managing their calendars, the family calendars, is a nightmare,” said Shetty. “I get 3,000 emails from my kids’ school every day and I kind of have a school agent that helps me with this.”

It’s a need that Howie Xu, chief AI and Innovation Officer, for Gen Digital, formerly known as NortonLifeLock and Symantec, heard about repeatedly. As a father of three school age children, he knew it was essential to keep the peace with his wife. And it resonated with many of his engineering colleagues who were struggling to juggle work and home demands. So his team set out to find a solution.

“They themselves are parents or they sit next to a person who has those kind of pain points. We said, ‘This is one of the first applications we are going to do,” said Xu. “For instance, for me, sometimes I missed appointments, missed the email. Basically, it’s your personal EA.”

Through AI Foundry, the roughly 10-person startup team Xu runs within Gen, he got to work on a solution, particularly when battling the onslaught of emails sent by kids’ schools. In early June, the company released Norton Family Assistant . With a few quick steps, the app asks parents to share their gmail, google calendar, google classroom and any other apps they may use for their children. Just in time for the end of the school year, the AI agent was able to help parents make sure they did not miss any key emails. It’s based on a freemium model, with the first two weeks being free. Then the price jumps to $25 a month or $20 a month for an annual subscription. But Xu hopes that parents will become so hooked that they will be willing to pay at any cost.

“When people see the value, they gravitate towards it,” said Xu, adding that one of their internal colleagues voluntarily offered to pay for it. The colleague “wanted to use it, to pay for it, because I don’t want to divorce.”

Norton Family Assistant is still in beta testing. But in the early weeks since launch, Xu learned quickly that parents wanted to receive this content in a message format, rather than being required to open another app. So his team already adjusted that. Xu now communicates with the app after it summarizes messages from his children’s school and has found it helpful.

But as it evolves, Xu hopes it will take some weight off of parents juggling work and children.

“People said that my pain point is being a parent. That's another job. That's a full-time job,” said Xu.