X-ai review

X-ai has announced sunset. Check out alternatives.

X-i has two pricing plans: individual and team. You can use x-ai for managing your schedules or your team’s. The product has separate meeting calendars and templates for individuals and teams.

Meeting templates are central to how x-ai works. A meeting template is a service which has its title, duration, location, life, booking page, and mandatory and optional participants. You can create unlimited meeting templates.

X-ai makes scheduling faster with their scheduling assistants, meeting templates, and instant scheduling.

The ai feature is cool but should not be a decisive factor for your meeting scheduler.

X-ai is affordable for individuals. At $8, you will get unlimited calendar connections. So, you can pool your availability and reduce double booking.

X-ai review: Who will find x-ai limiting?

If you are from the service industry, you will find that x-ai does not have enough customization and personalization to propagate your brand.

The do not have payment gateway integrations other than Stripe.

There is no direct integration with a CRM. However, with the integration with Zapier, you can connect with CRM and other apps.

The software’s primary target audience is sales and recruitment teams.

If you expect AI to take care of everything you might find it limiting. You have to accept the fact the improvements in ai are an ongoing effort and be forgiving and appreciative of the scheduling assistants, Andrew and Amy. They may not understand every instruction. Sometimes they get confused too. Moreover, there could be a series of emails for you and your guests. The reporting module in x-ai is not great. They do not have a calendar view of all upcoming and past appointments. The list report is useful but not as friendly as a calendar view. X-ai read the calendar and counts the available slots. However, it cannot tell you what meetings you have already.

X-ai review: Who will find x-ai useful?

As I mentioned earlier, sales teams will find this product handy. The combined meeting template is good for organizing internal meetings. The round robin template is good for customer calls and demos. Each team member will get their own calendar page and also can be part of the team calendar. With the meeting templates, they can quickly schedule a meeting. The chrome plug-in will make it easier to copy-paste and send available times to a customer without leaving your email or CRM inbox.

What is their business model?

They are trying to onboard more users through passive and active referrals.

Viability of the company

The company has been in existence from 2014 and they have raised close to 40 million dollars funding so far. They have been making improvements in the product.

I read some of the customer complaints and requests on public forums dated 2017 and tested them in this 2020 review. Their team has also grown over the years.

There is no clear number on the customer growth rate or count. I found their 2019 revenue as 3 million dollars on one of the portals which claimed that they got the numbers from the CEO, Dennis. However, I have seen Dennis decline comment about those numbers in other interviews. So, if you are thinking about if the company would be there after 5 years, yes you can be sure of that.

X-ai might get acquired by a larger company if they execute well. Hopefully, the service continues even after that.

X-ai review: How do they fare on the basic features of a scheduler?

X-ai has the basic features of a meeting scheduler.

1. Setting up availability
   1. X-ai integrates with Google, O365 and outlook.com calendars. You can connect an unlimited number of calendars. You can set up working hours, duration, available dates, and lead time. There are options to restrict the maximum number of bookings you take in a day and the available slots between different meetings.
2. Sharing with customers
   1. Booking pages – Every meeting gets its booking page; so does every team member and team. The calendar page will not display private meetings.  You can upload your logo and set a title to the booking page.
   2. Email – You can send the calendar page’s link to your guests or copy-paste a few times on the email. Your guests can book from there.
3. Meeting types
   1. By setting up parameters like the duration, location, team members you can create different meeting templates. Apart from individual meeting templates, there are team scheduling templates like combined and round-robin.
4. Post-appointment actions
   1. Notify: All participants get notification emails about meeting requests, time suggestions and meeting confirmations.
   2. Update: x-ai updates participant calendars about invitations and confirmations about a meeting.
   3. Block: Depending on how you have configured it, x-ai will block your calendar from another meeting or keep it open.
5. Online meetings: X-ai has integrated with Zoom and Google Meet, and generates online meeting join link for meetings

X-ai review: the differentiating features

• Unlimited calendar connections: Normally, schedulers have a limit on the number of calendar connections. Offering it as unlimited will make x-ai a winner among businesses and freelancers operating on a tight budget.
• X-ai network: in the future, we can see instant scheduling appear between all x-ai customers as the software can overlay calendars and provide the mutually available time.
• Copy-paste times on email without plug-in.
• Use chrome plug in to copy-paste times without leaving the tab you are working in.
• Conference room booking: x-ai reads resources marked in Gsuite or O365 and lists them for booking via x-ai. You can set a location, duration and map a conference room for meetings.
• Slack commands: you can call Amy or Andrew as a slack command and go ahead with scheduling a meeting with your team

X-ai review: the niche features

• The scheduling assistants, Amy and Andrew, are interesting additions to a meeting scheduler. They can take instructions from emails and co-ordinate the scheduling. I tried to confuse the AI in a few situations. However, it was able to do it. You can see AI’s interaction with your guests. That way, you can act if AI does something that is robotic 🙂
• Instant co-worker scheduling: if two people are on x-ai, the software has access to their calendars. The software looks at mutually available slots and sends a meeting confirmation to both. No need to invite and then confirm.
• Having built-in meeting templates make it very easy to get started with x-ai. With the templates placed contextually at different places in the UI, any team member can use it any time.
• Saving locations: Add new meeting locations. When needed, they will appear in the dropdown. This makes it easy for anyone in the team as they can use the most common meeting locations added by them or by their colleagues.

APIs

They do not have APIs currently.

Ease of use

X-ai is easy to use. The UI is easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. The focus of x-ai is on functionality. With larger font sizes and vertical scrolling, the app does not make you do hide-and-seek with the features.

There is a quick access ‘schedule a meeting’ button on the header from where you have options to copy-paste your times, use the assistants, create one time link

Help and support

The team is quick with their replies and can understand the problem when we explain it. I shared a difficulty that I faced during the evaluation which they filed as a bug. The help documentation is clear, and there is no need to reach the support team every now and then.

Bugs spotted

I faced a issue on the UI where I was not able to copy-paste timings. I reported it and they acknowledged it.

Privacy Policy

Read X-ai’s privacy policy here.

X-ai review: Pricing model

X-ai charges $8 per user for individual plan and $12 per user for team plan. X-ai charges per user and also for team scheduling features. In their Individual plan, though you can add users, you will not be able to pool availability and organize a team meeting or offer pooled availability for guests.

This is a different take in the scheduling market. Most vendors charge per calendar or calendar connections or the number of users. What x-ai is doing is charging more for functionalities.Generally the pricing structure is well-received as I see from user reviews online.

Total cost of ownership

X-ai charges $8 per user per month when billed monthly or at $12 per user per month when billed annually. A user is someone who can manage their schedule with your account. You can add users at $8. You need to switch to the $12 plan when you need to create a pooled calendar with your users(team members).  

Based on the integrations that you need, the cost will rise as subscription for those apps are added.

X-ai review: How it compares to the segment leader

X-ai focuses on their strengths and is well funded. They are introducing features regularly. One of the new features is Round-robin scheduling. Read X-ai vs Calendly review.

Summary of other x-ai reviews found online

The happier X-ai users are those who want to experience AI and are curious about the latest developments there. Naturally, they are ready to accept it when AI fails or the scheduling assistant acts as a machine.

Those who have been with the product for longer appreciative how the team is receptive of feedback and the way AI has progressed in the software.

X-ai also seem to have made it more possible to use the product without depending on the AI assistants. However, that does not indicate that they are taking eyes off improvements in AI.The pricing structure with starts at $8 per user has gone well with the user community. Some of the criticism is around the max participants allowed per meeting which seems to be around 10.

X-ai review: Rating

X.ai is an interesting product. If you want to experience AI in scheduling but ready to forgive some glitches in it, this is your scheduler. They are simplifing scheduling – even on areas where AI is not involved.

X-ai long term review

Often, you will find that the product that you started using with full conviction is not the one you need now, after a few years. The reasons could be that it is not able to scale, or the total cost of ownership goes enormous, the support is bad, there are no updates.

Our long term review is a way to observe how a product and the company behind it behaved in the last one year. This is an important read if you are buying the product for a longer term. Read our long term review about Vyte.