Fast Company's Maria Colacurcio put a sharp question on the table this week: AI is automating the coordination, communication, and care tasks that have always been coded as female and therefore unpaid or underpaid. For the first time, the market is pricing that labor. But the platforms extracting the value are not run by the people who developed it. Meanwhile, Prentis, the new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is raising $100M on the explicit bet that automating routine computer tasks, the scheduling, the coordination, the administrative glue, will outpace coding as AI's biggest use case. That is a bet on automating the exact category of work Colacurcio describes.
The Relational Labor Extraction Problem
Economists have a term for the undervaluation of care and coordination work: shadow labor. A 2019 paper in Feminist Economics by Folbre and Yoon estimated that unpaid care work in the US alone represented roughly 20% of GDP when properly accounted for. AI systems that automate scheduling, emotional support, client communication, and administrative coordination are finally monetizing that shadow labor, but as SaaS margins, not wages. The Prentis bet is essentially that the next trillion-dollar AI vertical is the one built on top of feminized, previously invisible work.
Who Captures the Value of Automated Care
The pattern is not new. The industrial revolution mechanized textile work that had been women's domestic labor for centuries, then captured the surplus in factory profits. The question now is structural: TurboFund's seed-stage AI investor list reveals that the funding flowing into AI automation startups is still concentrated in the same Sand Hill Road networks that have historically underfunded female founders. The technology may be gender-neutral. The capital structure is not. If the value of women's work is finally being counted, it would be novel, and probably just, for women to be the ones counting it.