Ford executive swaps Claude for ChatGPT as family assistant

Three months ago, a custom Claude assistant named Claudette was credited with saving a marriage. Now she's on a performance improvement plan, and a ChatGPT-built rival has taken over the family calendar.

Whitney Stefko Dover, an executive and senior counsel for Ford, created Claudette to collate their family’s emails and calendar to create a morning brief at 4am entitled "Daily Dover" that organised all from their children’s school schedules to domestic duties.

Dover has since created a new assistant in ChatGPT Work named Gigi, motivated not only by her husband's longstanding use of OpenAI but also by an August Substack piece written by venture capital firm a16z. 

Gigi takes care of the day-to-day operations of the family while providing a better interface, better drafts of emails and presentations, and even making suggestions without prompting.

The transition was smoother than expected because Stefko Dover had already documented how Claudette worked and connected to the family's apps. She uploaded that guide directly into ChatGPT, carrying over months of accumulated context.

"I think it is our job as the users to sort of own the context layer," she said, framing the swap less as picking a winning AI company and more as porting her own documentation between tools.

Gigi isn't error-free. It once suggested her husband send flowers to his best friend's wife after mistaking her identity, and a grocery order it built included 12 boxes of bow-tie pasta. Every Friday, Gigi now reads a shared grocery list and fills an online cart, though Stefko Dover still reviews and pays for orders herself.

Asked whether she'd give the agent direct purchasing power, she said she'd cap any card at around $500 "so there wasn't, like, Gigi purchasing diamonds on Rodeo Drive."

Stefko Dover has yet to finalise any of this process. Following her interview, she has incorporated a third agent named Ingrid, based on the by-invitation-only Instinct AI system, which can execute its function via text messaging and telephone.

Stefko is layering Ingrid onto Gigi, allowing Ingrid to message her husband’s agent directly to pass on to-do items without having to message him herself. "There's not a final destination here," she says. "The power of being a user is this constant iteration."