IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backward.)

The core idea is simple: Show the program how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed.

During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how his platform could learn to place a coffee order online. As I watched, IrisGo recorded the steps it took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), fill out credit card information, and then hit purchase. Lai then asked IrisGo to repeat the order on its own; the agent dutifully complied.

Buying coffee, of course, is not really the point. Instead, the hope is that the system will automate a whole host of business-related tasks. Iris comes with a built-in “skills” library — things like email drafting, invoice processing, report building, document summarization, and many other ready-to-use automated workflows. At the same time, Iris learns from the user’s desktop behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its potential list of action items.