OpenAI’s chief economist says unpaid housework, largely done by women, could equal 15% of global GDP, as AI firms increasingly view homes as workplaces.
“I’m in about 10 different WhatsApp groups. In January, OpenAI’s chief economist told the Financial Times that unpaid housework, which mostly falls on women, could amount to about 15% of global GDP.
“I’ll wake up in the morning and my groceries are already sitting on the front step, and I didn’t even order them,” Genet told The Cut. “I get anywhere from 20 to 40 emails related to kid stuff every single day,” David Reich, founder and CEO of Fambot, told Fast Company in January as he launched Fambot’s AI “chief of staff” for families. Reich points to a typical school newsletter: a 12-page document may contain only “two really important things”, such as an early-release day or a chance to sign up as a field-trip chaperone, buried somewhere near the bottom. “It’s important that the AI is able to transfer knowledge from one shoulder to the next shoulder,” she told Fast Company. “There’s so much mental load when I start my work week,” she told the Financial Times.
For years, artificial intelligence has helped professionals draft emails, edit reports, crunch spreadsheets, and write code. Now it is moving into the home, taking on the invisible work of remembering, coordinating, planning and anticipating. The next time you need groceries ordered, a school assignment remembered or a vet visit booked, you may not need a human assistant or even your own attention. You can hire an AI agent. That is what US entrepreneur and mother Jesse Genet discovered before a family trip to Lake Tahoe. A children’s book about boats arrived on her porch before her family left for the mountains. She hadn’t ordered it. Her AI agent, named Claire, had. Claire also has access to Genet’s Instacart account and monitors her family’s food supply. How an AI becomes the house manager Think of it as the difference between having a digital diary and having someone who actually reads it and acts on it. An AI chief of staff for a family connects to where household information already accumulates, such as email, calendars, messaging groups, and identifies what needs attention. I’m trying to get work done while it’s ringing like a slot machine in my pocket. Fambot proposes that parents should not have to manually extract useful information from long school newsletters. The AI can identify those details and turn them into reminders, tasks or calendar events. It’s important that the AI is able to transfer knowledge from one shoulder to the next shoulder –Rosaria Di Donna, Familymind co-founder Elizabeth Shaffer, a product manager in New York with three daughters, took this further. She used an AI tool to build a custom family website that logs household rules, children’s schedules, a baby’s weaning plan and emergency contacts. She also created a tool that scans emails and adds events to her calendar in bulk, then copies the resulting shopping list into ChatGPT to auto-populate her Instacart order. That is what separates an AI chief of staff from a family calendar or a conventional chatbot. A calendar records what someone has remembered to enter. A chatbot answers when asked. An AI assistant/agent reads incoming information, connects the dots and works out what needs to happen next. Familymind cofounder and CEO Rosaria Di Donna describes the technology as a way of moving information that traditionally sits in one parent’s inbox, calendar and head to the wider family. The evolution, then, is from reactive commands to proactive coordination. The AI is not just helping with the task you remembered. It is trying to remember the tasks you did not. The invisible labour of running a house Perhaps the most interesting use of household AI is not ordering groceries or filling calendars. It is its attempt to take on the mental load of keeping a family running. Tiffany Morris Palazzo, a US attorney and mother of two, receives a weekly AI-generated report that pulls together her children’s school schedules, her workouts, her husband’s commitments and whether they need a babysitter for date night. “All the things I’m thinking about for work and clients, layered on what I’m thinking about for my kids and family life. Being able to extract and consolidate information in a way that makes it immediately actionable is a total game changer. There is a larger economic and gender question behind this rush to automate domestic admin. Research has long shown that women carry a disproportionate share of unpaid household work. AI companies now see the home as an extension of the workplace. But there is a catch. How much should an AI know about a family? For an AI to manage a household well, it needs to know intimate details about a family. That makes trust a bigger issue than convenience.
Jesse Genet, the AI evangelist, runs her AI agents on a cluster of five Mac Minis and one $10,000 Mac Studio that sits on a shelf in her home like a personal data center. Laura Nolan, 42, a US-based healthcare researcher, told Financial Times, “I hope we use it to spend more time with our families and in the world, and not outsource the whole benefit of being human, which is connection. A May 2026 Gartner survey of 322 US consumers found that only 11% were willing to let AI make purchase decisions, even in relatively low-stakes categories such as household supplies. By contrast, 31% were willing to let AI narrow down choices for household purchases while keeping the final say themselves.
“We want families to opt in and feel good about it,” she told Fast Company, adding that users can edit or delete memories stored by the AI. Sheila Lirio Marcelo, founder and CEO of household AI provider Ohai, believes families should decide what information the system retains and what it can access. Some users are thinking about this more radically. She has also started running local AI models directly on her own machines, a strategy she came to after her cloud-based AI usage got expensive and then was cut off by her provider. There’s so much mental load when I start my work week. Being able to extract and consolidate information in a way that makes it immediately actionable is a total game changer –Tiffany Morris Palazzo, attorney and mother of two Local models mean her family’s information never leaves the house. As she puts it: “if the apocalypse happens, I’ll still have superintelligence at my fingertips. There is another concern: what happens when AI starts taking over not just chores, but the conversations around them? Consumers, meanwhile, appear more comfortable with AI helping them make decisions than making those decisions for them. For now, the AI chief of staff remains less an all-knowing overlord and more an unusually capable household manager. But its ambition is bigger than another calendar or to-do list. It is trying to automate the part of household management that is hardest to see: remembering what everyone needs, anticipating what might go wrong, and making sure someone acts before it does. The real question is no longer whether AI can do some of this work. It increasingly can. It is how much of the running of a family we are comfortable handing over to it. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.