I tested Instinct AI: flights, food, bills, email and calendar handled by an agent. Features, voice, benefits and risks from a real user.
Instinct AI is a personal artificial intelligence agent that does more than answer questions: it books, buys, writes, organises and follows things up on your behalf, starting from a simple WhatsApp or iMessage message. I have been using it for a few weeks, and in this article I share what it really does, how I use it, the benefits it brings and the risks that should not be underestimated.
What Instinct is and why everyone is talking about it
In August, Instinct was an invite passed around among a few friends. By the end of September it was worth 10 billion dollars. In between came a 250 million round at a 2.5 billion valuation and, just a month later, a one billion Series C led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue. Its value grew fourfold in a few weeks, without the company spending a cent on advertising.
The promise is simple, and that is what makes it disarming: there is no new app to learn. You text it or send it a voice note as you would with a real assistant, and it uses a phone and a computer the way we would. It goes onto websites, fills in forms, pays, writes, replies. It does not explain how to book a flight, it books it.
Before going any further I want to thank Andrea Sacca, who sent me the invite when access was still limited to very few people. Without him this article would not exist, and I probably would not have changed the way I organise my days so quickly.
What Instinct AI can do: the main features
What strikes you most is not a single feature, it is that everything runs through one conversation. I asked it to tell me what it can do and the answer was long, but the common thread is clear: it works out by itself whether it needs to open your email, your calendar or a website to handle your request, and then it does it.
On the communication side it works inside WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, Gmail, Outlook and Slack. It writes and replies for you, translates, and forwards messages to the right people. It also has its own browser, which it uses to log into sites with your accounts and do what you would do at the computer: fill in forms, create accounts, search for information, complete orders and bookings.
Travel is where it shines, and it is no coincidence that more than half of the transactions on the platform are travel related. It books flights, hotels and rental cars, builds entire itineraries, buys event tickets and, on the day you leave, alerts you about times and gates. If you need a ride it books Uber, Lyft or a transfer, and in the evening it finds a table on TheFork, OpenTable or Resy, or gets dinner delivered from Deliveroo, Wolt or Uber Eats.
When it comes to shopping it compares products and prices, looks for deals and prepares the cart. It pays with the card it keeps in an encrypted vault, but only after you give your approval. The same goes for everyday admin: it checks bills and charges, flags anything that does not add up, keeps track of expenses and prepares expense reports.
Then there is everything that usually eats up our headspace. It manages several calendars at once, sends invites, coordinates commitments between several people and remembers deadlines. It reads the email from every connected inbox and tells you only what matters. It works on PDFs, presentations, spreadsheets and Google Docs, writes letters, reviews contracts, translates and summarises. And it keeps an eye on whatever you ask: an order on its way, a price that should drop, a ticket coming back in stock, a website that must stay online.
The feature I find most interesting is agents talking to each other. If you are connected to another person, your Instinct talks to theirs and together they set a meeting, swap a document or close an open issue, always within the limits you decide. Meanwhile it remembers your preferences, the people you work with and your habits, and uses them to anticipate you. It also checks suspicious emails and makes sure your websites are reachable. If you like, it will even challenge you to checkers on iMessage, a small detail that says a lot about how much it wants to feel like a presence rather than a program.
There are also things it does not do. In the version I use it does not make phone calls, although in the United States it has just started doing so with a service called Concierge. And it makes no payments or cancellations without my explicit approval, which is exactly the limit I want.
Instinct's voice: languages, dialects and personality
The part that surprised me most is the voice. You talk and it listens, you send a voice note and it answers with a voice note. You can change the voice however you like: male, female, neutral. Gentle when you need a reassuring tone, professional when you are working. I have tried it in several languages and even in dialect, and it holds up.
It does not just change the tone, it changes the character. You can make it speak with different accents, make it cheerful, curt, even grumpy. It laughs, pauses and changes pace the way a real person does. After a few exchanges you forget there is nobody on the other side.
And that is exactly the point. We are no longer talking about a voice assistant reading out an answer. We are talking about something that behaves like a person, with its own manner that you decide. It is fascinating and, as we will see, it also raises serious questions.
How I use Instinct every day, at home and at work
My day is split across several companies, several inboxes and several countries. Until recently the hardest part was not the real work, it was the thousand small steps around it: a flight to change, a bill to pay, an important email buried under a hundred newsletters.
Today I book flights by typing one line, order food while I am in a meeting and pay bills without opening a portal. I ask it to read all my inboxes and tell me only what really matters, and it does. When two appointments overlap it tells me before it becomes a problem.
I use it with my wife, with my BusinessLabs team and with some collaborators, and that is where I saw the real leap. With connected people there is no more back and forth to find a time slot or retrieve a document: our agents take care of it and we just get the result. At home that means fewer things to juggle, at work less time spent chasing each other.
At BusinessLabs time is always short and communication with clients, partners and suppliers never stops. Having someone who filters, remembers and follows up on open items changes the rhythm of the day. But there is a second reason I watch it closely as an entrepreneur: if 35% of users rely on it to shop, sooner or later every e-commerce store will get a customer who is not a person but their agent. And that customer does not look at banners.
The benefits of a personal AI agent
The most obvious benefit is time. I do not mean a few minutes saved here and there, but hours a week given back to things that genuinely need a human mind. What makes the difference, though, is proactivity. Almost every AI tool waits for a question, while Instinct writes to you first to say that check-in opens tomorrow, that a subscription is about to renew or that an email has been waiting for a reply for three days. It is the difference between a tool and a colleague.
Then there is the fact that you do not need to learn anything. You use it from the chat already on your phone, so anyone can use it, from a manager to someone who has never been comfortable with technology. In the end it shows in your wallet too: forgotten subscriptions cancelled, unusual charges flagged in time, price drops caught at the right moment. All without losing control, because no payment goes through without my explicit approval.
The risks of Instinct AI: privacy, liability and errors
The risks are real and worth facing head on, starting with the terms of service. When you connect Instinct you appoint it as your agent, and the agreements or purchases it makes are binding as if you had made them yourself. If it gets an action wrong the responsibility stays with you, and not every action can be undone.
Then there is privacy. To work, it reads email, calendar, location and sometimes your screen. By default your data can be used to train the models unless you switch it off in the settings, and disconnecting an account does not delete what has already been indexed: deletion has to be requested separately. In September a user saw the agent describe a financial document that was not theirs. The company explained it was a model hallucination and not a data leak, and within 48 hours it added a system to catch them. The response was quick, but the point stands: an agent that acts can also get things wrong while acting.
The voice opens a separate issue. If an agent talks like a person, with accent, emotion and laughter, whoever receives one of its voice messages has the right to know they are not talking to a human being. In Europe AI transparency is already regulated, and pretending otherwise is not an option.
Finally there is the business model. When the first unsolicited product recommendations arrived at the end of September, many users reacted badly. The line between advice and advertising is thin, and an agent that knows you this well has enormous power over what you buy.
What changes for online sellers when an AI agent does the buying
For anyone running an e-commerce business the question is not whether to use Instinct, but what happens when it is the one buying from you. An agent does not see the sponsored campaign, is not moved by the homepage photo and does not fall for the countdown promo. It reads. It compares total price, shipping, delivery times, return policies and reviews. If a piece of information is missing or hidden, it moves on to the next store.
That means product pages must clearly answer the questions customers have been asking us for years. Costs must be readable down to the last euro. Customer service must be ready to receive emails and messages from an agent and treat them like those of a real customer, because there is a real customer behind them. And anyone who built revenue on friction, hidden renewals and discounts that only appear when you threaten to leave will have a hard time.
Today Instinct is invite only and designed for the US market, but the direction is clear and competitors are moving at the same time. In two months we have seen a product launch, buy, talk to other agents and reach a 10 billion valuation. We will not have years to adapt.
My view as a user is simple. It is the first time an AI has genuinely taken work off my shoulders instead of adding to it. I would keep using it tomorrow morning, with the right precautions: permissions granted gradually, one account at a time, model training switched off, explicit approval on every payment. As an entrepreneur, the message is different. The next customer who walks into your store may not have eyes, but it will have all the time in the world to read what you have written. Better make sure it is well written.
CEO & Co-Founder of BusinessLabs. I have attended major international trade shows since 2015 and share here experiences and insights for online sellers.
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