In The Blink Of AI with Georgie Healy 
About Dilani Kahawala
Dilani Kahawala is co-founder and CEO of Anna, an always-on AI personal assistant for busy parents. Anna connects to a family's email and calendars, picks out what needs attention, from school emails to calendar clashes, and raises it by text message, WhatsApp or voice rather than through a separate app. It is sold as a flat monthly subscription.
Kahawala has spoken about the engineering behind Anna, including why a consumer assistant must meet a higher reliability bar than AI coding tools and how mixing faster and stronger AI models keeps running costs down.
On In The Blink Of AI with Georgie Healy, she talked about the parenting admin that never ends, building Anna, privacy, and how children should learn to use AI.
- Talks about
- AI, Founder Journey, Product
In conversation.
1 episode
In The Blink Of AI with Georgie Healy Go straight to the good bits.
Key moments from The Admin That Never Ends: Dilani Kahawala on Building Anna.
- 0:00Cold open: the school pickup
- 1:17AI headlines: Navier-Stokes and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- 4:38Meet Dilani and Anna
- 7:36WhatsApp group chat or inbox
- 9:12PhD or three WhatsApp groups
- 10:26How Anna handles the boring admin
- 11:16The school pickup
- 13:17Are kids doing too much?
- 15:14The magic wand week and the lunchbox bin
- 16:35How Anna was built
Across the network.
In the room with
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correctionUpdated 29 October 2026
Be part of
the conversation.
Put your brand alongside the voices founders, investors and operators come to hear.
Explore sponsorshipProduced by W2D1 Media
Want a show of your own?
W2D1 Media — the team behind the Day One Network, which helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts — builds and produces podcasts for funds, founders and operators. If you want a show built around your brand, let's talk.
