Familiar Labs Let’s talk

Research

We study how people and AI shape one another.

An agent that stays with someone should belong to that person, even when it works with a team. We study what that relationship can carry forward—and what must remain theirs to decide.

Research questions

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  1. How can AI agents belong to people and still work for teams?

    When everyone brings an agent of their own, company work moves among people, agents, and shared spaces. We are studying what context they should share, how they hand work off, and how each person's familiar can remain theirs while contributing to the team.

  2. What becomes possible when you never have to start over with AI?

    A familiar can carry the history of the work, our standards, and what we have learned together from one project to the next. We are studying how that continuity changes the relationship—and what can develop even as models and devices change.

  3. What changes when people no longer have to be the routing layer?

    People still move information between conversations, tools, and teams—and remember what happens next. We are studying whether agents can handle more of that routing and coordination without taking over human judgment or responsibility.

  4. What could life and work with AI feel like beyond the screen?

    We study how voice, movement, physical spaces, shared surfaces, and new devices could support people as they move through the day without continually pulling them back to a screen.

  5. What must be true before an agent can act on someone's behalf?

    Answering a question is different from taking action. We are studying what an agent needs to understand before it can carry work forward, coordinate with others, or handle routine tasks—and when a person still needs to make the call.

What we believe

People should not be the continuity system for AI.

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A decision made in one conversation can disappear from the next. Someone has to find it, carry it into another tool, and explain it again to another agent. That person is doing work the technology should help carry.

An agent that stays with a person could take on more of that work. But if it remembers across projects and years, ownership stops being a footnote. We believe the person should keep the relationship when they change jobs. The company should keep the decisions and work made for it. Both forms of continuity matter, and neither should become the other's property.

That boundary follows an agent into shared work. It needs enough context to help without passing a person's history to everyone else. It follows the agent into action: what may it carry forward, and when should it ask? Even the interface changes the answer if using AI demands more attention than it returns. We build and use systems to see where these boundaries hold.

The future we want gives people more room to be human.

Saving time is not enough if every recovered minute becomes more output. We are interested in technology that creates more room for relationships, creativity, rest, presence, and the parts of life that should not need a screen.

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