first things I did when I left my full-time job at WIRED was give
access to my email and calendar. After reporting on
for years, I was curious about what the technology could do for me. I had imagined Cowork as a hyper-capable digital assistant, but was let down to discover that it was more like interacting with a regular chatbot, albeit one
Then Instinct, an invite-only AI agent that communicates with users through iMessage and WhatsApp, started popping off in the Bay Area. It connects to your email, calendar, and messaging apps. Think of it as
for normies. The company, which launched in private beta in February, is
to raise $1 billion on top of the $350 million it’s already raised, bringing its valuation to $10 billion, according to The Information.
Instinct’s moment in the spotlight comes as Meta is experiencing its own unexpected burst of popularity thanks to Muse, an AI assistant the tech giant launched earlier this month. As of writing, Muse is the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, with more than 900,000 downloads,
. The commentator class on X seems genuinely excited about it, despite the fact that it rolled out with a serious security vulnerability that would have “let attackers do ‘whatever’ they wanted on a victim’s Mac,”
. I’m not about to give Meta a ton of my personal information, but if Muse can keep me logged into Bloomberg or unsubscribe me from Hot Yoga São Paulo, which has been emailing me once a week since 2017, I’ll reconsider.
The divide between people who use AI agents for everything and those who have
has never been wider. It explains, in part, why tech CEOs were largely
. If you think agents can automate the majority of people’s administrative drudgery and turbocharge their productivity, the costs and disruptions associated with building data centers might look like an acceptable trade-off. But if you’re using chatbots as a fancy form of Google, that deal is probably much less appealing.
writes, is that “most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most won’t notice even when they are.” AI agents, like chatbots, still require a lot of input and direction from users. If you know what you want—
—the tools are eager to provide. But if you don’t, well,
, but I like to think I’m action-oriented. Surely I could identify a software-shaped problem in my life. I had used Claude previously to generate a few freelance invoices, saving me approximately 10 minutes. It was nice, but not life-changing. I decided to give Instinct a try.
If you talk to AI researchers about Instinct, you’ll hear the phrase “form factor” a lot. Instinct got the form factor right—no open text box, just iMessage, WhatsApp, and a few helpful prompts. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. Rather than trying to figure out for yourself how to make the chat experience more useful, you’re texting with an agent that’s suggesting things it can do for you, and then actually doing them. And unlike other agents in this space, it doesn’t text too much. I tried a competing agent called Lindy for a week and deleted it after it texted me each morning and started popping into Zoom meetings without my approval.
For its first project, I gave Instinct my itinerary for a work trip to Venice, Italy. I had it book reservations based on where I was going to be, including WhatsApping hole-in-the-wall spots. Success! Restaurant reservations appear to be a gateway drug for many agent-curious people, and I was no exception. (It’s worth noting that while Muse can also call restaurants to book reservations on your behalf, some of those calls are reportedly made by humans in call centers,
Next, I gave Instinct a more complicated task. I had already booked a trip to New York in November with my sister when WIRED asked me to attend the
, which was taking place in Miami the day before. Unfortunately, I’d booked a saver fare, meaning I couldn’t move the ticket, and if I missed the first leg of the trip it would automatically cancel the whole thing.
Could Instinct cancel my trip and get a refund? To my surprise, it could. The agent detected that Alaska had moved my flight 90 minutes earlier, a fact I’d completely missed, which qualified me for a full refund. It canceled my ticket, saving me roughly $550, and rebooked my one-way return to San Francisco. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starting to
This is where I have to pause and acknowledge the risks of using Instinct. There are a lot. People
that when they tried to disconnect the agent from their email, they found out it was retaining a copy of their inboxes anyway. One
he was banned from Resy after the bot pinged its API roughly 200 times per hour while trying to make a reservation. Another tech investor
he deleted the app after determining that it would be trivially easy for Instinct to be phished.
are pretty far-reaching, allowing the company to use at least some of your conversations to train its AI models. I also experienced an annoying (if minor)