Why Professionals Are Losing Touch—And How aikin Can Help Rebuild Real Connections
You care deeply about your network. So why is maintaining meaningful connections so frustratingly elusive?
Ask most successful executives, founders, or fundraisers what has contributed most to their career success, and you'll likely hear one word more than any other: relationships. Yet ask those same people how effectively they keep those relationships alive, and you’ll realize that most of these people (maybe you’re one of them?) feel they could and should do more.
The reason isn’t a lack of care—it's cognitive overload. Our digital lives have expanded across multiple platforms, including email, LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, texting, and WhatsApp. Each of these channels multiplies our exposure but also fragments our attention. Suddenly, meaningful relationships become scattered, lost among hundreds of unread notifications and forgotten follow-ups.
In other words, it’s never been easier to meet people, but it’s never been harder to keep a good connection with them.
The Hidden Cost of Disconnection
We often underestimate the cost of neglected relationships. Missed introductions, forgotten follow-ups, and overlooked messages aren't merely small oversights—they’re lost opportunities, collaborations that never start, and business ventures that quietly disappear before they begin. Each connection we fail to nurture represents unknown possibilities lost to the ether.
What if the difference between good and exceptional success is just keeping in touch?
The Illusion of Current Solutions
This isn’t a new realization. Professionals have long recognized the value of networks. Yet the tools available today—CRMs, reminders, chatbots, even human executive assistants—fall short:
CRMs: Built for sales funnels, not professional relationships. They are task-driven, impersonal, and transactional.
AI chatbots: Reactive, general-purpose, lacking genuine context or emotional intelligence. They may handle tasks but struggle to nurture relationships meaningfully.
Human executive assistants: Effective but out of reach financially for most people. Even for those who can afford them, assistants can't scale to handle hundreds of nuanced relationships (and you would likely have them do something else but sifting through thousands of emails and messages on your phone to gauge which connections should be revived).
We don’t need another database or productivity hack—we need something fundamentally different.
aikin: A New Kind of Assistant
Imagine an AI partner quietly monitoring your communications, invisibly watching patterns, and identifying neglected relationships. When a contact drifts out of your field of view, aikin steps in, nudging you gently:
“Hey, you haven’t spoken to Sarah (Investor, last contact 3 months ago). Here’s a thoughtful message you might send her on LinkedIn.”
This approach is not reactive; it's anticipatory. It’s not transactional; it’s relational. Rather than imposing more work, this assistant quietly enhances your outreach, ensuring no meaningful connection fades into the background. Ultimately, the user decides whether and what to send to the suggested contact.
It is precisely this philosophy that is at the heart of aikin, our AI-powered executive assistant.
Starting with Connections, Scaling to Become a Ubiquitous Assistant
At aikin, we’ve recognized something important: relationships are the core currency of professional life. By solving relationship management first—intuitively, intelligently, unobtrusively—our AI can gradually evolve into something much broader.
We start with the immediate pain point: proactively maintaining your most valuable connections through personalized outreach across email, LinkedIn, Slack, messaging apps, etc. Our initial users describe the experience as having a trusted Chief of Staff: one who knows their network intimately, ensures no one slips through the cracks, and thoughtfully prompts them to reconnect.
But this is just the beginning.
As aikin learns, it naturally becomes more attuned to your preferences, tone, schedule, and priorities. It evolves into a ubiquitous executive assistant, managing not just your outreach but also your meetings, travel, tasks, and even your decision-making.
Our vision isn’t to just improve productivity. Our vision is to reshape how you work, fundamentally freeing you from busywork and enabling you to invest fully in what matters most: authentic human connections.
Relationships, Supercharged
Imagine a future where professional networking doesn't feel like effort—where the AI assistant in your pocket quietly handles the cognitive load, prompting meaningful connections precisely when they matter most.
This isn’t science fiction. This is aikin, and the first step is happening right now.
We’re currently running an alpha with select users. Interested? Sign up here.