What is Orchid AI, and why is its latest ad so controversial?

Posted on by faz_business


AI assistants have been pitched as a solution to overflowing inboxes, messy calendars, and trips that still need booking. But what happens when the task being outsourced is remembering your anniversary?

The startup Orchid introduced its personal assistant with a now-viral cinematic video, posted to X July 28, following a woman whose partner has forgotten their anniversary. After she tells Orchid what happened, the assistant contacts him, books a dinner reservation, arranges a flower delivery, and keeps her updated on his progress.

“Introducing Orchid, the first assistant that actually gets you,” the company wrote alongside the video. “It remembers what you forget. Down to the flower.”

By the end, Orchid has transformed the mistake into what looks like a thoughtful anniversary celebration. Viewers were less charmed.

The video received more than 20 million views within its first several days, but it also attracted hundreds of replies from people disturbed by the future it seemed to present.

The reservation and flower delivery were hardly the most controversial parts. AI tools already help users search for restaurants, make plans, and select gifts; apparently, romance is now just another workflow waiting to be automated.

So, what does Orchid actually do?

Orchid describes itself as a personal assistant that users communicate with through text messages. The company says it can manage email, schedule meetings, prepare users for calls, plan trips, source gifts, handle invoices, and remember personal details.

Users can also ask Orchid to create recurring “habits,” including delivering a morning news briefing, checking the weather, tracking meals, sending medication reminders, and automatically checking them into flights.

The product’s primary audience appears to be professional. According to Orchid’s FAQ, it was designed for “founders, investors, lawyers, agents, and agency owners” whose time would be better spent on “real work” than administrative tasks. The company’s only published case study focuses on helping an executive prepare for client calls.

But the video shows the assistant doing more than organizing someone’s calendar. Orchid appears to connect to the users’ iMessage accounts in order to communicate separately with both members of the couple, passing information between them and reporting one person’s actions to the other.

Orchid co-founder Nizar Abi Zaher told Gizmodo that “Orchid allows multiple people to communicate with the same agent and share context.” For now, he said, that feature is “just group chats and also coordinating meetings.” In the advertisement, however, the couple appears to be communicating with Orchid through two private conversations.

Although Orchid’s homepage promises “a hundred tools, one assistant,” its FAQ says the product presently works with Gmail and Google Calendar. Integrations with Outlook, Slack, Notion, and Linear are still on the way.

The company also says the AI acts “only within the limits that you set.” Email responses remain in drafts until the user sends them, while calendar holds require approval. It also says it does not sell users’ data or use it to train AI models.

A shared assistant raises additional questions. The ad doesn’t explain which information each partner has agreed to share, whether either person can access the other’s messages, or how Orchid determines what it can report back. At least, not yet. Mashable has reached out to Orchid for a comment.

Social media isn’t sold on Orchid’s vision

The possibility of using AI to shape a relationship is not especially new. In a 2025 survey of over 5,000 U.S. singles, 26 percent said they were using AI to enhance their dating lives, a 333 percent increase from the previous year. Nearly half of Gen Z singles had used it for tasks such as filtering matches, writing messages, and evaluating their dating habits.

AI has also made its way into established relationships. A 2026 survey of 1,000 married U.S. adults found that 44 percent had used an AI tool for relationship advice, rising to nearly 65 percent among millennials. That growing use has not necessarily made people comfortable with AI’s expanding role — about half of U.S. adults believe AI will worsen people’s ability to form meaningful relationships.

That discomfort may help explain why Orchid’s ad went over so poorly online: “an AI for perpetuating your dead-end relationship that both parties secretly hate,” one X user wrote. Another described Orchid as an “assistant for people who want to subcontract all the basic acts of care that make up a relationship.” Some users described the concept as “lame,” and an advertisement for “adult babies uninterested in the world they live in.” One viewer offered a more concise thought: “Tech people need to stop.“

Some people suspect the company understood exactly how the scenario would be received. “I think they knew what they were doing and hoped the ragebait worked,” one user wrote. “Unfortunately it did.”

The company has said it intentionally built the advertisement around a story instead of creating a traditional product demonstration. “We wanted to build a story around a real situation,” the Orchid team explained in a behind-the-scenes video.

At least one member of Orchid’s team appeared to be taking notes. “If you have feedback on Orchid or ideas on what would make you actually use it, my DMs are open!” Lucas Valbuena, an intern at the startup, posted on X as the backlash spread. Meanwhile, other Orchid employees, AI companies, and engineers publicly rallied behind the company.

The ad also made its way to r/ExecutiveAssistants, where the person who started the discussion said their “heart kind of broke” after learning about Orchid. Along with worrying about the loss of human connection, they asked whether AI could eventually replace people in their field.

The assistants who responded were mostly skeptical that Orchid could replace them. One predicted that products like it would become tools executive assistants use, leaving humans to catch hallucinations and supply the context AI misses.

“Execs are way too lazy to work these out themselves,” the commenter added. Another dismissed Orchid as “marketing fluff aimed at the people who could never really afford us,” arguing that a reminder app cannot reproduce the emotional intelligence experienced assistants bring to the job.

That skepticism helps explain why Orchid’s ad bothered so many. An assistant can book a table and order flowers, but those gestures usually matter because a partner remembered the occasion and chose to make them in the first place. In the video, Orchid does that work while the human receives the credit.

Orchid promises to remember an anniversary “down to the flower.” The backlash suggests people still care who remembers it in the first place.

Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Social Media



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