So you can look at what matters in the morning — before you drink your espresso.

Everyone is born into a family. That's beautiful and difficult at the same time. We carry a piece of luggage we never chose. I was born into an entrepreneurial family. My family has run a department store in Bern since 1881 — Loeb AG. That gives you observation angles others don't have.

Every generation has its own challenges. I had the privilege of living in peace, in a time defined by technological upheavals. When I played my first Space Invaders game as a child, I knew: this is a field that will shape me. Many dismissed it as a toy back then. Ten years later the personal computer had reshaped the economy. Networks — and eventually the internet — plowed through entire industries.

From hub to catalog to browser

The department store today isn't what it used to be. Originally it was meant as a hub: everything under one roof, goods and services in the city center. With the internet, that logic shifted massively — back toward the catalog business. I'm using the word catalog deliberately, because in 1880 catalogs were the second form alongside fixed locations.

Catalogs lost ground in the period that followed. People wanted to see the goods, try them on, meet each other, celebrate the purchase. The department store and all the new physical retail formats dominated catalogs for over a century. Until computer networks and the internet changed the foundation. We have Amazon, Walmart, Zalando — and many other players with new formats that have shifted the balance of power massively from physical to online retail.

In Switzerland today, over 30% of fashion items and already 15% of groceries are ordered and delivered online. As the cherry on top of this booming era, Chinese providers come in pushing low-quality goods at the cheapest prices.

From sellers' market to buyers' market

What's the essential thing that has changed in this period?

I learned it as a student: a transition from a sellers' market to a buyers' market. Meaning: the goods on offer are so abundant that it no longer matters whether the customer comes to the goods — what matters is how I, as a company, bring the goods to the customer. That was the birth of marketing 40 to 50 years ago. It has only become much more intense since.

Nobody today has the capacity to process all the information about products. Picking the right product has become a game of chance. More than that: it has become a question of trust — which retailer do I turn to in order to find the right product at the best price?

What does this have to do with the AI era?

In the age of information, where everything is freely available, we are now experiencing the same overwhelm as we had with goods. There's too much of everything. It's hard to tell the important from the unimportant. It's even hard to find the relevant information in reasonable time. The information, opinions, positions, arguments and counter-arguments are so varied — the pressure and counter-pressure on us so manifold — that it has become practically impossible to make an information-based decision in reasonable time.

As a coping mechanism, we fall back on trusting friends, or on our own and others' past experience — disconnected from the current situation. In short: a lot of information has become useless. We can observe this in social life everywhere — we lean toward group-think much more than toward developing our own positions.

That was the case 20 years ago, before the AI era. Already back then we had:

Influencers
Bloggers
PR agencies
Corporate blogs
Newspapers
Free dailies
Magazines

The universe of content creators had already grown enormous. But that was just the beginning. Now comes artificial intelligence.

What AI changes

First and foremost: that content creation now costs almost nothing. What used to take days of work on a single video can today be achieved in a few hours with a few tutorials. Suddenly poems and prose of high quality can be created in the shortest time. It doesn't run autonomously yet — but it's far more productive.

Software development is just as affected. Where building a website used to take days, you can now do it within an hour with the modern vibe-coding tools. The first time you use them it takes a bit longer — but with a few days of practice you're there.

Just as with content, the same is happening with software. Anyone can build software, and the number of products and lifestyle businesses is growing massively. Every niche can be covered because the cost is no longer high.

What does this have to do with me?

So that's my journey from the department-store world to the information world. I've been in AI software development for three years. Many years of coding before that. Today I barely write code myself — only in exceptions. My productivity has gone up by a factor of 10, 20, 30.

Can I now just write new software in a few days? Sadly no — we're not quite there yet. But it's possible to write and rewrite entire software systems within months as a single coder.

I started by saying: I was born into an entrepreneurial family — and now I have this wonderful tool. So what did I spend my time on?

I want to solve the most pressing problem we are moving into: information overflow. It used to be a topic for a few specialists — today it's the headline issue in every profession, in every company. We've seen it everywhere: in shopping, in news, in content creation, in management.

From newsletter to inbox

My first answer to it was an AI newsletter that pulls together a lot of information and re-creates it. Filter out what matters so we can concentrate on the work that actually counts.

In daily use it became clear: that works for daily news, but the information sources we consume usually aren't tightly enough connected to what we need right now. So came the step from newsletter to track-your-topic: searching for the information that's relevant now. With this approach I was very close to Google Alerts. Re-inventing it certainly makes sense — but the distribution and the customers' willingness to pay are limited. Free solutions are expected here.

So my next step was the inbox. And here an even more dramatic picture emerged. The number of daily emails has grown from an original 10 to 20, to 30, to 50 — for executives now reportedly to 100 emails per day. Who can still handle that? Practically impossible.

Several companies have recognized this problem and addressed it with classical machine learning. But thanks to new AI technologies and vibe-coding it's now possible to solve the problem comprehensively.

What Protime can do today

It's no longer just a classification problem (which email goes into which folder), it's:

a draft problem: can I have my email replies pre-written in my tone of voice?
a calendar problem: how do I efficiently create meetings?
a task problem: which tasks matter today?
a news problem: which news do I need to read today?

If you bring these layers into harmony, you build a tool that — like vibe-coding for software development — gives back factors of time in the working day.

According to recent studies, we spend 30% of our working time searching for information. That's twelve hours per week. Imagine winning back half an hour or an hour per day. Suddenly we have a high-performing organization that's no longer overloaded.

What's the advantage of an organization that's not overloaded? It makes the right decisions. Its operational excellence is outstanding. Customers prefer its products and services. And so the organization wins in the market.

The shovel

I'm not saying that Protime is the only building block to take on knowledge work in the new era. But it is an important one.

AI triggered the content avalanche — through cheap creation, cheap distribution, cheap personalization. AI is at the same time the only technology fast enough to push back. I'm not OpenAI, not Anthropic, not Google. I'm a vibe-coder using the same tools that flood your inbox today — to build a shovel that empties it again. That's all it is. And that's all it should be.

I built it first for my own inbox. Then for Loeb AG, the family business since 1881. If it works for us, it might also work for you.

Trying it costs nothing: 14 days, 800 credits, no credit card. protime.ai →

AI triggers a Content Avalanche. I built a shovel.