A new AI assistant has emerged which tech insiders claim finally delivers what other apps have long promised —a bot which can book your plane tickets, draft emails and nab restaurant reservations.
Instinct, an upstart company which lives in iMessage or Whatsapp rather than its own separate app, lets users text it like you would an actual human assistant.
“You can use OpenClaw [a similar product] in iMessage, but they’re clunky experiences — this is the first AI assistant I’ve recommended my wife and kids, who aren’t techies, should use,” said John Borthwick of Betaworks, an early investor in Hugging Face (but who has no stake in Instinct).
The company is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation — a number more than four times the $2.5 billion valuation investors estimated it was worth only a month ago. Overall, an enormous sum for a company only launched in February.
It’s so new, the product is still invite-only — which also adds to the allure.
Christopher Rim, CEO of Command Education, said he never hired an assistant because giving a person instructions, checking their work and managing them can be more trouble than it’s worth.
“I’m the type of person who likes to just do it on my own,” he told me.
But since beginning to use the service a few weeks ago, he’s been bowled over. After giving Instinct an itinerary for an upcoming trip to the Middle East, unsolicited it arranged an airport car service — a free perk of flying Emirates first class he didn’t even realize he had.
Instinct also followed up with his hotel to let them know he was coming and suggested rearranging his meetings to make his route more efficient, so he wouldn’t spend his day doubling back through Dubai traffic. It essentially did the work of an entire advance team for free.
“It’s insane,” he added.
Borthwick, a top investor, said he likes Instinct because it has found the right voice and cadence with its texts— something which many bots struggle with. People quickly get annoyed and silence or delete apps which overcommunicate or have the wrong tone, research shows.
Competitors like Poke have unveiled similar products but remain at much smaller valuations, as the market is crowded and cutting through the noise around AI and its adoption is hard.
The only areas Instinct, founded by 23-year-old Noah Shinn, has run into questions about are security and privacy. As with any assistant, product accesses email, messaging, calendar, location, and other data pools — it’s just not clear exactly how much it is storing and what it does with data. Instinct didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Matthew Ammirati, who runs multiple businesses, said he erected guardrails after a few bad experiences with other Large Language Models. “I’m not letting it delete anything,” he said.
He has, however, given Instinct permission to read and write emails. Which has helped him out from under the more than 500 he receives daily.
“It’s giving you the ability to kind of clear your head and focus on the work you actually need to do,” he said.
When I asked Instinct what LLM it uses, it demurred.
It did assure me my data was secure, “Everything stored about you is encrypted at rest, and what gets indexed from your connected accounts (email, calendar, messages) is used only for your experience — never to train models.”
The fact its answer was opaque is enough to give someone pause, although when something works so well, who wants to give it a break?
There’s also a question about what happens when everyone else has a digital assistant acting on their behalf, too.
Resy temporarily deactivated one user’s account after their Instinct assistant tried to book a reservation at 4 Charles in the West Village 200 times in one hour.
Such hiccups aside, there’s a lot Instinct has going for it. From an investment standpoint the service is hot, but the question of whether that enthusiasm for the product justifies a $10 billion price tag, or whether it could be just the latest sign of an AI bubble, remains to be seen.
