Can AI help with the chaos of family life? | Avni Patel Thompson (Kelly Corrigan takeover)
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You are listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm Kelli Corrigan. I'm a writer, I'm a podcaster, I'm a TED Talker, and I am taking over for Elise Hu this week for a special series on AI and family life. I guest curated a session about this topic at TED 2025, and I'm here now to share these very special talks with you, along with a lot of behind the scenes recordings and personal insights to shed some light on the process of how these talks came to life. So last year, after I gave my TED Talk, I was invited to this women's dinner. And there were probably 25, 30 women there. And they all had incredible jobs. Many of them had spoken before on stage.
Many of them had written books. Many of them run their own companies. And Avni Patel Thompson was one of those women. She had started to develop a product that parents would use to manage the onslaught of logistics involved in family life, such that the parents could be more engaged when it counted. And I knew that if we were going to pull this session off, we were going to need somebody who was actually designing AI that parents would use to manage their families. So I followed up with Avni and I said, what are you working on? And she said, oh, we were just trying to lighten the load for parents using AI. And I was like, hmm, what'd you just say? I think we better jump on the phone and have a conversation.
And so we did. It's interesting when you ask somebody like Avni to talk about AI and where it should and should not enter the parent-child relationship. I didn't want to set her up to be the villain. I did need her to be super direct about exactly what areas of family life her product was considering getting involved in. And that yielded a really interesting takeaway that you'll hear in the talk. about a conversation she had with a board member who was starting to see these fascinating and potentially profitable product extensions that made Avni start to wonder what the consequences of that kind of product development might be. And that brought up this really interesting question, which is, is there something lost
when you are not in the weeds with your kids and their lives? Is there a way in which reducing all this noise around logistics threatens some of those tiny time-sensitive interactions that you can occasionally have with your kid when you're driving them to baseball? If you remove every possible hiccup from family life using AI, does that somehow weirdly reduce the number and variety of situations you might find yourself in that are quote-unquote teachable moments? So I was desperate to get Avni to write a TED Talk. Now, when she sat down to do it, she had about 4,000 ideas that she was trying to cram into nine minutes. So the process of working with her was to try to narrow her field of vision on this thing and ask her if you could only say one thing.
If people listen to your talk and then they walk down in the hall and their friend said, oh, I missed that one. What was it about? What would they say? What do you want them to say? And that's really hard. And I totally empathize with it as someone who tried to do it the year before. There's this terrible inclination to try to boil the ocean. And it's very painful to let go of the opportunity to say three things or four things. But it's unwise to bite off that much. And so the process with Avni was to continually refine. What do you know that no one else knows about designing AI for family life? Scientist and serial entrepreneur Avni Patel Thompson has created three startups to support family life, including her most recent effort, which has much to teach us about the future of our most intimate and consequential relationships.
And finally, with like no time to spare, she came up with a really brilliant point that is specific and memorable, and you'll hear it now in Avni Patel Thompson's TED Talk.
Go get it, baby. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. So it's a Tuesday afternoon, and I'm in my home office working on a tricky product design.
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