Instinct, an invite-only personal agent reached through iMessage or WhatsApp, can act on email, calendars and booking services without requiring users to learn a separate interface. In a WIRED trial, it arranged restaurant reservations for a trip and found that a 90-minute flight schedule change qualified the traveler for a full refund. It canceled the old itinerary and recovered about $550.
The practical result shows why messaging may be a better interface for consumer agents than an empty chatbot window. Instinct suggests concrete tasks but does not constantly interrupt. It can navigate ordinary administrative work across services, including waiting for an opportunity that a user overlooked in email.
Those capabilities require broad access and create substantial risk. Users have reported that copies of their inbox remained after they tried to disconnect email. One person's account was banned by restaurant service Resy after the agent reportedly hit its API about 200 times an hour, while another user concluded that phishing the agent would be easy. Instinct's terms also permit at least some conversations to be used for model training. The company did not respond to WIRED's questions.
The test exposed a smaller but concrete failure too: Instinct canceled a delayed food order despite instructions to do so only if a refund was available, costing the user $64. Useful automation does not shift liability from the customer, so high-impact actions still need explicit confirmation and easy revocation of data access.