A while back, I was commiserating with a friend about the pressures of being a working mom, that sensation of juggling endless responsibilities with something always slipping through the cracks.
“What I really want is a wife,” my friend remarked. I burst out laughing because it so precisely summed up our shared exasperation. Both of us have supportive, egalitarian husbands who pull their weight with housework and childcare. Yet, they still aren’t a wife.
Marketing entrepreneur and podcaster Sonia Baschez went viral earlier this week for declaring that what she wants from AI agents is “a wife,” not “a husband” — by her definition, something that anticipates your needs rather than merely executing assigned tasks.
Let’s lean into some broad, gendered stereotypes for a moment. Consider the “mental load” — the phenomenon in heterosexual couples with children where the mother often carries a running mental inventory of chores and considerations, even when the father pitches in.
The classic example: a dad offers to grocery shop if given a list, but that requires the mom to first know what’s in the fridge and what the weekly meal plan entails.
Some folks rave that AI agents like Muse or Instinct are like having your own executive assistant. But honestly, I don’t need an executive assistant at work. I’m not a jet-setting executive booking constant flights, nor a developer building an app — which seems to be the focus of many product demos for tools like OpenAI’s Dots.
Instead, I’ve found AI agents (I’ve tested Muse most extensively) most valuable for personal and family tasks, particularly the paperwork, scheduling, and messages from my kids’ schools and activities.
Essentially, I agree with Baschez’s concept. I want an AI wife! I want something I don’t have to feed detailed instructions to; I want it to just handle things.
It’s not there yet. While Muse has been great for saving time on specific discrete tasks like completing and submitting a school form, for many tasks I’ve assigned it, I still have to do significant work on my end providing step-by-step directions. Basically the same dynamic when I ask my husband to do something and then think, ugh, it’s just faster if I do it myself.
I spoke with Baschez about her idea.
“I think generally, women understand that if I’m going to have an AI assistant, I want it to do enough for me that I actually feel like I’m reclaiming part of my life,” Baschez told me.
“A lot of women who run their own businesses like me are saying, ‘This would be great so I can focus more on my business where I’m not doing that dumb administrative stuff, but then also I can focus on my family and not have to do the emotional labor and the mental load.'”
Baschez said many of the reactions she’s heard from women mirror mine, and that even most men grasped the concept (though at least one person missed the joke and thought she genuinely believed wives were just “chore mules”).
She’s fully aware that the metaphor of AI as a “wife” rather than a “husband” leans into gendered stereotypes that don’t reflect all partnerships. But it’s useful shorthand people grasp — something that helps regular folks imagine what use an AI agent could have for them.
Plus, there’s a funny way AI reveals some 90s-sitcom-level stereotypical gendered behavior. I saw a tweet today about a dad whose wife asked him to read a book to the baby, and he considered training an AI model on his own voice to read audiobooks to it instead (unclear if he actually followed through).
Another humorous tweet about Amazon cutting off AI agents had the Rodney Dangerfield-esque punchline: “I already have a human agent who buys way too much shit on Amazon called my wife.”
Right now I’m testing Muse, Instinct, and Dot — giving them similar tasks to compare performance and see which is easiest for me to use. But my initial tests have revealed an unpleasant side effect: now I have too many “wives,” and they’re nagging me all day. Husbands: you finally have my sympathy.