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Glenn Kaonang · · 7 min readEx-Siri engineer bets AI PCs need a butler, not another Copilot
Should AI assistants be like Marvel’s Jarvis or DC’s Alfred? It’s the question Jeffrey Lai had in mind when he was building his startup, IrisGo.
Jarvis, the AI assistant to fictional genius Tony Stark, is often used as an example of how AI could serve users in the real world – executing complex tasks from simple voice commands.
But Lai, a former Siri engineering lead at Apple, isn’t convinced it’s the best application for PCs. He and his co-founder, Lman Chu, want something more like Alfred – Batman’s resourceful and ever-present butler.
Image credit: Timmy Loen
“Alfred knows everything about Batman,” Lai tells Tech in Asia. “He will take care of everything and get things done so that Batman can focus on things that truly matter, which is being the Dark Knight.”
The two primary founders started IrisGo in late 2024 after recognizing the limitations of today’s AI tools: cloud dependence and context blindness.
Lai draws inspiration from his time at Apple. He imagines what the tech giant might have done with AI if Steve Jobs were still alive.
“He would likely be very dissatisfied with the way today’s AI agents serve users – it’s just too fragmented,” Lai says.
That’s the guiding philosophy behind IrisGo, which promises to be more than just a prompt-based tool. It’s a “context-aware, on-device assistant” that tries to learn what users need, possibly before they even know it themselves.
CAPTCHAs begone
IrisGo is designed to have email replies drafted, travel plans updated, or reminders queued up for users based on what it sees them working on.
Also described as an “AI butler,” it runs as a standalone app, unlike many AI assistants today that live in a browser tab. That gives it local access to files, calendar and email clients, and browsers.
IrisGo users will have an interface where they can see all the email drafts and news updates the app has compiled. However, most of the process runs in the background.
To complete tasks like making restaurant reservations or purchasing concert tickets autonomously, IrisGo relies on either APIs or the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – a framework standardizing how AI models connect with different data sources and tools.
Developed by Anthropic, MCP is still in the early stages of adoption, but it’s supported by firms such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
From stealth to OEM partnerships
Cloud still matters
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