Nowadays vs Ask Marcus

Nowadays is an event management platform built for corporate teams that need to plan offsites, retreats, and company gatherings without hiring a full-time planner. It covers venue sourcing, registration, budgeting, vendor coordination, and day-of logistics in one place.

The platform uses AI to contact venues by email and phone, collect availability, negotiate rates, and surface the best options. Nowadays is IATA-certified and books events at volume, which unlocks preferred hotel rates and concessions that teams typically cannot get on their own.

It fits startups planning their first retreat, people teams running quarterly offsites, executive assistants sourcing venues, and enterprise teams managing events across multiple cities. Clients include Google, Airbnb, Stripe, Notion, and HubSpot.

Ask Marcus is a philosophy chatbot that puts you in conversation with a GPT-4 persona modeled on Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic writer. You type questions about leadership, self-discipline, or daily setbacks, and the bot answers in the tone of his Meditations rather than generic self-help copy. The interface is a single conversation window with a New Chat button and no account required to start.

Unlike broad AI assistants that pull from the whole internet, Ask Marcus stays inside Stoic philosophy and quotes from Marcus Aurelius himself. The free plan caps you at 10 messages per user, which forces focused questions instead of open-ended rambling. A premium tier for unlimited messaging is listed as in development on the site.

The tool suits philosophy students, history readers, and anyone curious about Stoicism who wants a low-friction way to test ideas against a classical frame. It works in the browser on desktop and mobile with a dark-mode toggle, and the whole experience loads from a single page without downloads.