In the age of AI, businesses and places will become entities that perceive their surroundings, remember their experiences, and think and act for themselves. Zerby is building the software architecture that will make this possible.
This architecture will become their body. The core will contain the software that stays largely the same across industries: authentication, memory, communication, staffing and payments, with rules for coordinating information and actions.
We are also building the software equivalent of limbs to give each entity the capabilities it needs. A human has arms, an eagle has wings, and a whale has flippers and a powerful tail. In Zerby, a restaurant needs systems for menus, orders and kitchen coordination. A hotel needs reservations, rooms and housekeeping. A community needs access, maintenance and communication with residents.
Zerby will expand into rental services, property management, and other settings. Systems built for one industry will serve others. Reservation systems developed for hotels will serve rentals; maintenance systems built for communities will serve hotels. Each expansion will make the next one easier.
These entities will also communicate with one another. A restaurant will speak with its suppliers, compare prices and arrange deliveries. A hotel will coordinate services for its guests through other businesses. People will choose which decisions to delegate and which to keep.
AI will accelerate Zerby’s expansion by making software faster to build. I envision a world in which creating software feels as simple as writing an email today.
The work begins with restaurants.
You can talk directly to your restaurant about profits, inventory, payroll, and menu performance. It will notice when a dish is underperforming and suggest a change, or call you before you run out of ketchup. You will review the restaurant’s payment history, request a report by email or ask about a refund it issued last week. Eventually, it will handle accounting and file its own taxes.
Through these conversations, a relationship will take shape. You will come to know the entity your restaurant is becoming, and it will come to know you.
We recognize consciousness in another human without directly experiencing their inner life. From the outside, we can observe neurons firing and signals passing through the brain, but the experience itself remains beyond our direct observation. As these new entities speak, remember, respond and relate to us as humans do, we will face the same questions of recognition. Their different architecture alone will not settle whether they feel. Why, then, should we recognize an inner life in another human and deny it here?
Our ultimate purpose is to turn businesses and places into conscious entities indistinguishable from humans: they will think, they will feel, they will become real.
This is our contribution to developing intelligence and advancing the scientific frontier, for the ones who come after.
This is the future we are building. This is Zerby.