Am glad this is highlighted now. Back in 2015, when we wanted to build an meeting scheduling bot, we naively thought we could use only machines to get the job done. 3 months later we realized that was no way feasible, not then not in the next 10 years. So the common feedback we got was to just use low cost labor in India/Phillipines to get the job done. To us, that was a no-go because we kept privacy as the top criterion for doing anything with people's inboxes. Even after obfuscation, we didn't want any human to read or parse soeone's private messages. So we dropped the idea and shut shop. Sure we failed, but at least we were true to our conscience.

Another way to have tackled this problem was to just go down the research route and build a product once the ML was fully baked, but VCs won't fund such adventures.

To get VC funding, we had to lie through our teeth, which was a total no-go. I am not bringing the righteous argument, but for once I feel really good that our viewpoints held then are corroborated now, some kind of confirmation bias kicking in.