Tired of meal planning or nagging your spouse? Outsource it to a machine.

The first time Brit Kwait, a vegan mother of three in Chicago, outsourced her meal planning to AI, she felt like a 1950s housewife who’d just used packaged dough for the first time.

But in 2025, her kitchen shortcut was an app called Ollie that used artificial intelligence to help her branch out beyond stir-fries and grain bowls.

Every week Kwait, 40, types into the app what’s on sale at her local grocery. Ollie comes back with recipe ideas, tailored to Kwait’s family, the rest of whom are vegetarian. “They’re picky on what they’re going to eat,” she said, estimating that the app saves her as much as five hours a week in planning.

Kwait is among the busy parents turning to AI-powered apps to manage the logistics of family life. The tech industry and Wall Street focus mostly on workplace uses for the technology, but she and others using AI at home say it can lighten the mental load of running a household.

These tools can require handing over highly personal information and reinforce gender disparities at home. But early adopters say the apps help them juggle tasks such as meal planning, scheduling doctor’s appointments or coordinating school pickups.

Courtney Johnson, a 36-year-old postdoctoral fellow in biomedical research and mother of two in San Antonio, credits Ollie with improving her relationship with her husband. Before they started using the app, daily texts about “What should we have for dinner?” were a trigger point for the couple, who have divergent work schedules and dietary restrictions, Johnson said.

Now “we don’t have that little tension point anymore,” said Johnson, the only gluten-free member of her household. The couple reviews Ollie’s picks once a week before heading to the grocery. “It has given us both time to think about other things than: Is it chalupas, spaghetti or tacos tonight?” Johnson said.

Danielle Lovell, a 41-year-old mother and tech executive in Vancouver, said Maple, another AI-powered app pitched at families, helped her feel less overwhelmed by the logistics of both running a household and caring for aging parents.

Lovell uploads several calendars to Maple to automatically create events and assign household tasks. She pays 85 Canadian dollars per year for it, although there is also a free version. She says it helps her schedule medical appointments and reminds her when it’s cozy-dress day at her daughter’s school. Meanwhile, her husband does the meal planning and cooking and is the first call for an emergency school pickup.

“I manage the digital brain of the family,” Lovell said, “and he manages the body.” When her husband asks her the name of the parents of their daughter’s friend, or for the serial number on their car tires, she tells him to check Maple.

Vinod Khosla, whose venture capital firm has invested $5 million in Ollie, said it is an example of a class of AI apps he expects to expand and become able to help with more household tasks. Access to information about customers’ specific buying patterns, preferences and budgets will allow the apps to guide individuals like a personalized Consumer Reports scouting the best deals, he said, “and then, over time, do more and more of your tasks.”

Ollie is focused on meal planning and grocery shopping, CEO and co-founder Bill Lennon said. More than 50,000 families use the app, which recently introduced a $9.99 monthly subscription fee for new sign-ups. Users can swipe through recipe ideas, mark favorites, or ask for ingredient substitutions or portion adjustments.

The app also connects with Instacart and Amazon Fresh for users who want their groceries delivered, and Lennon said the company may add calendar-wrangling features. He predicted that today’s household apps will eventually evolve into home robots that do physical labor. He expected that they will be toiling in homes by 2030.

In a peer-reviewed study published in 2023, AI experts from Britain and Japan predicted that within a decade, automation could reduce by 39% the time spent on domestic tasks. They judged grocery shopping to be the “most automatable” out of 17 household tasks and physical child care “the least automatable.”

Vijaya Parameswaran, a practicing dietitian at Stanford University who is developing an advanced AI system for nutrition care, said she sees a lot of promise in AI apps helping people “to explore eating in ways that we never did before.” But “the intuitive nature of how we eat is what has to be preserved,” Parameswaran cautioned.

Food choice is also very personal, she noted, adding that not everybody wants to share such intimate information with an app, and some “are not comfortable in being told what to eat.”

Rather than approaching an app like Ollie asking, “What should I buy?,” Parameswaran recommends prompts like: “These are the things I have: What can I do with them?”

Kwait said she initially found the app’s suggestions too repetitive but now asks Ollie to “be more inventive” when she wants more variety.

Ekaterina Hertog, a professor of AI and society at the University of Oxford, said that while these AI apps might be efficient, using them generally “doesn’t change the underlying inequality” in how women typically manage more household logistics and labor than men do.

“Once you bring technology into that unequal setup, it doesn’t magically solve it,” Hertog said. “What often happens is that women start managing another thing.”

Lennon said he recognizes that women often shoulder most of the mental load in their families and that he and his co-founders are busy parents themselves trying to translate the explosion of AI tools in the business world into the domestic sphere. He sees Ollie as similar to previous advances in household technology such as running water and appliances.

For these apps to work well, they need a lot of personal information. While CEO Michael Perry said Maple doesn’t sell customer data, he also stressed that the app isn’t encrypted or compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal law protecting people’s health care information. Perry doesn’t encourage inputting medical data into the app.

Hertog, the AI and society researcher, said people tend to think less critically about protecting their privacy when it comes to technology related to their home lives.

Lovell, who uses Maple to organize her family life, said that she has a “fatalistic approach” to data privacy and that the information she stores on the app feels similar to what she has already entrusted to other apps and such Big Tech companies as Google.

But not everyone is ready to embrace AI in the household. Lovell’s housekeeper declined when asked whether she would use Maple, saying she didn’t want to learn a new app and didn’t know anyone else who used it.