The Startup Ideas Podcast - Instinct AI: The AI Assistant for normal people

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

I sit down with Remy to go through Instinct, the new invite-only personal agent that runs inside iMessage. Remy shares his raw chat history on screen: a haircut booking in Copenhagen, a restaurant reservation, a Bali visa on arrival, and an Emirates Skywards sign-up. We cover the parts that impress us, the points where the agent hits a wall, and the privacy questions that stay open. By the end of this episode you understand what Instinct does today, and you get fresh ideas for personal agents in general. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 02:08 – Instinct Pros 11:18 – Instinct Cons 13:16 – Simple Onboarding 15:19 – Tools and Connectors 17:43 – Example 1: Booking a Haircut in Copenhagen 20:24 – Example 2: Restaurant Booking and Calendar Entry 23:03 – Example 3: Bali Visa on Arrival and Emirates Skywards 26:00 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Instinct hides the agent complexity behind a phone number and iMessage, so a first-time user starts in seconds. Remy gets it to book a haircut, hold a restaurant table, file a Bali visa on arrival, and open an Emirates Skywards account. A spend-limited virtual card keeps the blast radius small when the agent pays for things. The agent stalls when a task needs a phone app or an Indonesian checkout page. Users report that Instinct keeps copies of email after they disconnect Google, so treat privacy as an open risk. The trusted person network lets one Instinct talk to another, which builds network effects into the agentic era. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND REMY ON SOCIAL X: https://x.com/remy_gaskell Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiwithremy AI with Remy: https://www.aiwithremy.com/

Yeah, you've probably heard of Instinct AI by now. You know, the invite only personal agent app that's raising money at a rumor $10 billion. Well, what does it look like inside? And what are some use cases? And what are some crazy things that you can do with it? Like, you know, saving money on your phone bills or getting a visa approved in a foreign country with only three messages. Well, today, me and my friend Remy are going to show you the inside of Instinct AI,

the secretive invite only app. We're going to show you how it works, where it shines, and where it could use a little bit of help. The TLDR is it really does feel like the personal agent app for everyone, including your mom. I've got a few extra invites, so if you like, comment, and subscribe to the channel, I'll give it out to some random people. And I hope someone from Instinct watches this and just piles me with a thousand invites that I can give to everyone. So let's get those likes, comments, and subscribes going, and I'll see you by the end of the episode. AI with Remy's here. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to give you an overview on the new agent product instinct that has just come out.

We're going to go through the good and the bad. I think they've done a lot of things well and some things not so well. So, yeah, by the end, you're going to get a full overview on the product as a whole and how you can be using it within your life. So different use cases, what you like about it, what you don't like about it, why it's interesting, why you should pay attention to it or not. By the end of this, people, I think, you know, what I hope, Remy, is that people just don't understand what instinct AI is and how to use it, but also just it gets people's creative juices flowing around personal agents in general. 100%. I think there's some cool lessons to be taken to apply to your own business with how the founders like rolled it out, how they've been, how they've built it with like network

effects, some cool things like that as well. Cool. Let's get into it. Sweet. So I just wanted to touch as well on like what I think it did really, really well and then what I think it did really, really poorly. So what I think it did well is the right amount of dialogue, not too verbose, used reactions really, really well. And it understands them too. Like I could thumbs up react to messages. It would ask me for approval. I could just thumbs up react and it would take that as a yes. The utilizes Apple I message features really, really well. Like the loud messages, the confetti reactions, it can listen to your voice notes that you send through. Apple messages. And this one, this one was like genuinely blew my mind. It was, I sent it a game pigeon. Greg, do you know game pigeon? Like the, um, I message games. I can't say I do. So, I feel like I should. You like, this is a thing like back when I was like younger, you could send, it was like an app called game pigeon and you can send games, you play games through I message with people. So I sense instinct, uh, this cup pong one. And, sent it off to it and it came back and started playing the game with me i was like genuinely gobsmacked

we'll see if it does it here waiting for opponent give it give it like a minute it's right yeah straight away back on your table you can see i was i was i was playing cup pong and it's nailing it that's crazy just absolutely cleaned up and then that was my turn to play back so that was that was like a really, really nice touch. Like, I'm trying to, I'm imagining that the instinct team would, like, would have gone through so much extra dev to get these game pigeon games to work. Like, they have to have actually coded that. I can't imagine that it's just genuinely doing it, doing it itself.

So that was super impressive. Memory was, was cool. So, um, when I asked it a question in the chat about trying to get my monitor box wrapped, when it filled out the Vs on a rival card, I noticed that it put in a thing about, like, how many suitcases? And it added in, like, the monitor. that was being checked into oversized. So little things like that, I noticed that it would pull things and ideas that I'd said earlier

that I'd even forgotten about and pulled them into current conversations. So it did that really, really well. Productivity, as you saw, it just reaches out. And when I asked it to find me a place like I've ran a desk in Bali, it messaged me the next morning and said, by the way, if you wanted it the same day, the cutoff is 12. So order it this morning. Little things like that were really nice. Overall, the simplicity.

So this ties into this one below is it's basically just open claw or hermium. agent, but for regular people. And I think that Hermes agent and open core as great as they are, they keep getting further and further out of reach for normal people because the power users all love them and they need to keep releasing new features to keep up with what the power users want, but every new feature they add to cater to that group moves it further out of reach for a normal person who doesn't really understand agents very well and is trying to use them to take task off their plate. So I think that this is just like, yeah, they've done it really. really, really well as like a personal assistant agent for like mass market general consumers.

I think they've done it absolutely flawlessly. And also to the use cases, none of them individually are life changing. They just took like 10, 15 minutes off my plate here and there. But add that up and I can see it like genuinely being really useful, saving me hours over the course of the week. I also thought, Greg, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, but the invite only approach that they took, I thought was really, really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of Clubhouse. Like the early days of Clubhouse. I'm not familiar with Clubhouse. Oh, man. Oh, man. Remy, Remy, Remy. So in 2020, there was a Twitter, basically Twitter Spaces app that was invite only and you'd go into these like rooms and like Naval was speaking and Elon Musk would be in rooms and like it was, but it was invited. only. And they ended up raising money at like, I don't know, a $4 billion valuation. And it became this thing that, you know, got really big. That being said, you know, it never lived up to the $4 billion

valuation. So I think the question a lot of people are going to have for this is, is this a club host moment or is instinct going to live up? It's rumored that it's raising money at a $10 billion valuation right now. That's just crazy. That's absolutely insane. So I don't know. Who knows? But I think the way that they did the invite was pretty clever because it made like it just,

if I, if I had instant access to it and I probably wouldn't have even signed up because there's just every new post you scroll past on X is introducing X agent, introducing Y agent. It's like, but the way they did it was super secretive and like I couldn't get access. As soon as I got a code, it was like, oh, I'm invited. So they say they're rolling it out like that for compute, but I kind of think that it was a marketing play as well, which is cool. And then Greg, the trusted person network that they released or are releasing is really, really cool. So Noah, the founder tweeted this, I think yesterday talking about the trusted person network.

So they are basically releasing this feature where you can add other people's instincts as an allow list into your instinct. So you can have like instinct to instinct communication, which I think is like an incredible example of network effects. If they can get on it early and like capture a good portion of the market, I think that that could work really, really well for them. Yeah. I think when I read this, it really, what really blew my mind is that it's the equivalent of network effects, but for the agentic era. Like I think, you know, a lot of people weren't things. thinking about network effects in this way. And I think that, yeah, when you read the tweet,

it makes so much sense, right? Of course, you want your agent to coordinate with other agents to get stuff done. And I think a lot of people have questions now around, you know, especially in the startup ideas and just the venture-back startup world is like, you know, where are the moats of these companies? And I think you're going to start seeing more

and more companies do stuff like this. Yeah, yeah, agreed. I mean, it would be interesting to see if they ended up opening it, so you can have your muse agents talk to instinct agents or whether they keep it a closed network. I'm really curious to see what route they go down, but I think this is just like a really, really, really cool feature. The other thing was, yeah, super fast computer use.

I think a lot of these use cases, you could make an argument that you could do it with Grockbot, but I find that the Grockbot computer use is really, really slow, and I found that the instincts computer use was just super fast and seamless. You can't even see it. I'm assuming it's using a computer in the back end. And then, like, tying off, I think that it just fills the whole of a personal assistant AI within my stack, like really, really nicely.

I don't really see myself using this for anything business, work, coding related, but just for haircut bookings, like restaurant bookings, making plans, I think that that's going to be really, really helpful. And those two, they also added in, yeah, they also added in, this feature where every instinct now has its own email address. So my instinct's email address is like Remy and my last name at mail.instinct.com. So now it can use that inbox to sort out bookings and do its like PA tasks for you without clocking up your inbox, which I think was really cool. Also one of the features they said was you can just loop it into an email thread. So if you're in

an email thread and like it involves a task that you want instinct to handle, you can just kind of forward it the thread and it can be looped in and finish it off. for you, which I thought was a really, really cool feature too. So is your recommendation for business tasks, use Hermes, OpenClaw, Grockbot? And then for personal tasks, use instinct? Yeah, that's how I'm rocking it right now. I'm using, like, I'm loving Codex at the moment.

I think they've done an incredible job. So I pretty much keep a lot of my work stuff within, split between like Code, ClaudeCodeCode, Grockbot. And then this is just fills the whole perfectly for a personal assistant AI. So, yeah, that's exactly. how I'm using it. One note two on like the open clone home is for regular people. I set up a homies agent for my mom so she could just have a personal agent to use for this kind of stuff. But

it's still involved. I had to set up a VPS with like Docker and then set it up for her. I then had to get her to use Composio so she could connect her tools up. The gateway crashes here and there and then it needs an update. Just a pain in the ass and then like I have to manage that too. And there's no way that she was going to set that up for herself. So I think that this is just, I think, these simpler agent products for the mass consumer market, especially like what they've done here and how they've built this. They've done it really, really well. The stuff they did poorly was, I'm not going to put down like some of those issues with ordering food and grads in Indonesia to instinct. I'm going to give them the benefit of the

doubt. But I think that security and privacy is something that I've seen as major cons to instinct. There's a tweet from Claire where she's talking about how she disconnected her bot from from Google at 11 AM but got a summary of her emails at 12. So it's obviously indexed them and kept copies of all her emails, which is a big concern. Another one from Peter Yang as well where he said, yeah, the same thing, indexing and retaining all his emails without their permission. And people also, too, I saw in the comments, pointed out things too about in instincts, terms and conditions.

They have some really concerning things about retaining and keeping control of some of your private data like emails. So if that's a big concern for you, I think it's definitely something you need to, yeah, look into with instinct. I mean, yeah, of course it's a concern. You know what I mean? I think like in an ideal world, instinct is by Apple. And I just have way more trust in Apple than a startup just by definition. But the reality is Apple is not there yet.

and the reality is this product could save me hours a week and it's the hours a week of stuff that I hate doing and so it frees up my mind so I can build my own ideas and build other stuff that's actually high leverage so it's one of those things where you know obviously I have no affiliation and you have no affiliation with Instinct but like we we like tools that help us to make our lives easier.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Like, this is definitely going to be a tool that I continue to use for sure. I can see it definitely fitting into my stack super, super nicely. So as soon as I signed it with Instinct, it's, I can't remember the exact flow, but it was, you signed him with a phone number. And then straight away, it kind of got me into iMessage. And then this was like a message that it fired off as part of its onboarding. And that was the first thing that, like, blew me away is how simple.

the onboarding was. I think that's where a lot of AI products lack, especially if they're trying to go with like the mass consumer general market, the onboarding is not straightforward and clear enough. Like people underestimate how, I'm not going to say like how dumb the average person is, but I think that as, you know, we're in a bubble, Greg, and this stuff's like super simple for us, but for people like my mom who's super smart and like other aspects of life, she would just struggle to understand like basic AI stuff that you and I take for granted. So that was the first thing it did super, super well is simple, clear onboarding. There's no concept of MCP, CLIs, markdown files. It was just log in with the phone number,

bang, you're in. And then this, oh, the first thing as well is it utilizes the native Apple I message things really well, like these little confetti animations. It sends those natively. And I've noticed that throughout my entire conversation. If there's something like important, it'll use like the loud effect and it will make the message go big. So I just thought that was a really, really nice touch. So it feels human. And even, I mean, we'll get into it later. But like when you read the text, it really does feel like it's a personal assistant that is a human being.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And then off the rip, it's straightaway like, sends me pictures of like here's some use cases. Here's what I can do for you. And then straight away, like demo some really cool things like booking flights, check you into your flights, you know, ordering food, canceling subscriptions. booking movie tickets, you know, adding stuff to calendar. Another cool one here, I noticed that it shows off you can send voice notes, which is cool.

And then just straightaway like I'm running an invite-only beta program, here's your link. I also thought it would be cool to, I'm going to open the platform that goes alongside the agent view. So this is the platform that ships alongside the agent view that we get. So just super simple workspace. It's like here is your contact. methods. I've set up both iMessage and WhatsApp to chat to it on and then connectors. I've connected up my email accounts and then Slack, granola, and then link for payments, which I'll get into it in a minute. But I didn't bother connecting up other things like Outlook and Linear and these other

like GitHub and stuff because I, like I see this fits really nice into my stack as a personal assistant agent. And I think that they've marketed it quite well as that. And like Noah in his announcement post was pretty clear. He's like, focusing on building the best personal assistant AI product. Then the next thing I noticed is it's got a vault where you can save in things like logins for different websites, cards as well, which I've given it two credit cards, and then addresses that you can save in it as well, as well as like phones. And then preferences, I think this is just for signing methods and some data controls.

There's a couple of other features as well. They've rolled out a trusted instinct agent. network, which I'll go into you later as well, but that isn't showing up for me there, because they're rolling out these features just to certain users at a time, like slow dripping them out. So there's a few things that I don't quite have unlocked yet. But the interface is super simple. Like I can just, you know, like when I think about this product and think about like the general everyday consumer, I just think about like my mom and how like amazing this would be for her and her life. So I can see people like that just being able to

have this bookmarked and then easily just connect out whatever tools. they need. I can't really see many people needing more than an email and maybe some kind of payment method just for like everyday assistant type tasks. So yeah, pretty cool. This little workspace, I think they've done that really well. Back into the agent session. So I don't know what task to give you. And it started to flag some things from my granola and my emails. But I didn't really want to go down the work route here. Flag like things related to my work stuff. But I really like clear. had in mind, like, I see this filling the role of a personal AI assistant for scheduling, like appointments, nothing like business or work-related or coding-related tasks. So I then had the

idea. I wanted to, I wanted to like get a wavy perm on my hair because I had like dead straight hair. So as you can see, got it done, it looks pretty good. So I messaged instinct. And I was like, can you message this place in Bali on WhatsApp asking if they do perms? And then straight away, It couldn't message the account on WhatsApp, so it just sort of directed me to do it myself, which I, like, first little thing where I felt a little bit of friction. And then I asked it to find me places in Copenhagen. And it went away and, like, started researching a bunch of spots. And then it pulled in reviews, and it said, want me to check who's got openings next week.

And I asked it to go and find some photos, which it sent me. It sent me some more as well down here. and then I asked it for some more options. It just did a bunch of research, mainly looking at like reviews. And then it's, I picked one and asked it to check their availability. And it tried to book, but then it ran into the wall of it needed a Danish phone number. So then it just emailed them. And then I said, yeah, please book the Saturday spot.

It emailed them. And then it just said, okay, great, I've emailed them. because I couldn't book without a Danish phone number and it's like I'll just ping you when they reply and then straight away it just said I mean this was like a few hours later

it just reached out and it was like confirmed you booked I heard back from them I wonder if they they know that an AI agent booked it or do they think it's a human being I think they would have thought it was a human being I remember I actually I went and looked at the email it sent because I was curious how the writing style was

and I remember I don't have it up in front of me right now but I remember being pretty impressed with how it wrote. It sounded very, very human. So that was the first thing. And to be fair, I did a lot more back and forth here than I needed because when I'm trying out new agent products, it's like a bit of a teething process in the beginning to try and feel it out and see where it gets stuck and where it doesn't.

So there are lots of times when because they've made it so simple, you can't see what the agent's doing or what it's working on. So the times it would go silent for five minutes, and I would follow up, go, like, hey, did you get that? And it was working away in the background, but now I've started to realize that when it just goes silent, like it's not broken, it's just, it's handling it. So now I just feel more confident when I just give it a task and I can just put my phone away and not worry.

And it'll come back like 10, 15 minutes later sometimes. So, yeah, booked me in. That was the first task. Is it booked in a haircut, which was cool. And then I asked it while I was sitting there in the haircut, chair about booking a restaurant for three. So it went in and checked what availability are open for Bistro Central. And then it pulled in a couple of times. And I just said, can we book a table for 745? And then it says, come back. It says all stage just needs a card on file

for the no show hold. And this was when I was like, oh, we're getting real. We're getting into the, we're giving the agent a card. And it just sent me straight away. It sent me this link to just add in a card, like card details. And that took me to this page. here. I mean, it no longer works, but it literally just was an instinct. Back to that workspace I showed just before, but it had a field for name, card number, expiring, then CV. So the way I did this is obviously I'm not completely negligent. So I use wise for like my banking. So I just created a new wise card. You can spin up like new digital cards really, really easy for like Apple pay. And so I spun up a new digital card, set a daily spending limit on it for about 500

dollars and because you know if like the agent goes nuts and if the max it spends is five hundred dollars it's not the end of the world for me so um did that and then i just gave it the card details for that daily limited card so then i just kind of felt a little bit more comfortable because like the the blast radius would be contained and then uh straight away here added it and it it reacts to messages which i find quite cool there sometimes as well like I find it has a really nice balance of knowing when to reply and when to just react to stuff. So sometimes it doesn't always give you a reply or just react, which is, I think, like, a nice touch. So I think, Greg, as you know, a lot of these models now, when you're talking to them,

they're like overly verbose and just like word vomit back at you. Exactly. I mean, again, goes back to being like human, you know, a human being knows when to react to something and when to write. and I think that's like the big aha moment that people are having with instinct is yeah it just it's scary it's scary human it's like if it's so it's so human it's scary yeah yeah 100% agree so that was really seamless there that booking was like I was pretty impressed I mean obviously I had to stop to add the card but it just straight away check they they got availability bang added the card straightaway booked it and I had the confirmation email

come through so that was that was that was really really cool and then I started just, it added it into my calendar and then I asked it again for some more restaurant bookings the next night, which was cool. And then this was, this was where I like started to really push the boundaries. I asked it because I was in Copenhagen and then heading to Bali for three weeks. So this is the message I sent it right here. It was just, can you please sort out my Bali visa? I'm an Australian citizen heading there on this date until the end of the month, just on visa on arrival. and it came back and it did just it gave me a little checklist of everything that it needed and then uh the next thing i did was i asked to sign me up to emirates sky wards as well

because you can get free wifi on emirates flights if you're signed up to skywards so two like generally genuinely like useful things off my plate there and and quite risky things with the visa too so sent those off uh came back then it asked for a photo of my passport, which I willingly obliged. So send it a photo of my passport. It said, passport's good. And then it says, like straight away, that also gives me the date of birth for the Skyward sign up, which was like, cool. So it's like working on both those tasks for me. And then gave me the list of what else it needed. I sent it a photo of me. And then just asked it like, you know, arriving on the ninth, but if my flight gets delayed, is that okay? And then

asked it to find the address from Airbnb as well. So yeah, delays no problem. Anyway, moving on, it just started to go through getting what it needed from me. Here we go. So here's, here's where it had everything it needed. And then straight away, it sent me my visa on arrival, my PDF. And I was like, pretty, pretty blown away by that. As soon as it, like, had what it needed, because, like, there was a bit of back and forth because I hadn't, like, got my shit together. But once it had what it needed, it sort of the visa out for me. One of the questions that asked me for the arrival card, it needed to know what countries I had been in the last three months. And it went through my emails and Airbnb receipts.

And it legit gave me a list. It was said to me, I need a list of everybody you've been in three months. Here's what I've got so far. Did I miss anything? And it got everything spot on. So that was cool. And then it. And when I got to, when I got to Bali, I was like sweating a little bit because, as you know, like they are, they don't mess around with with immigration stuff.

you'll be deported from that pretty quick if you get something wrong. So I was rocked up to the gate and scanned my passport, like fingers crossed, hoping that everything, like, I placed my trust in instinct to do this for me. So I put my passport down and then the gate, like we did a little like, beep, scanned, opened. And yeah, it was a cool moment. Totally. It's a lot of trust to put in instinct.

And I bet you those immigration guards haven't heard about instinct. you know, it's not like you'd be like, I had instinct to it. Yeah, there was no, like there was no, yeah, pushing the blame onto someone else there. All right. Well, I think that's it. Remy, thank you for coming on and breaking it down for us. Like always, I'll include links for where you can follow AI with Remy in the show notes in the description. Anything you want to leave people with, Remy?

I think this is a great one to get your non-technical, those people that you have in your life where you are like super in love with using agents and you do everything with agents and build amazing products. And everyone has those people in their life that aren't quite hooked on it yet. They haven't had that aha moment. And I think the instinct can be the one to give it to them. So if you manage to get access, I think this is a great one to share and get your non-technical people who aren't using agents properly yet.

get them all that. So send them this episode so they can learn about it. It's still invite only. I've got about, I think, seven invites. So if you comment and like this video, I'll give it away to some random people. And, you know, I wish I had 7,000 because I feel like we're going to get a ton of comments and likes.

But, you know, hopefully if this gets a ton of likes, comments and stuff like that, the instinct team will reach out and we'll try to get it. get more, more invites out. So, Remy, thanks again. You're a legend. Thank you for bringing it down. And I'll see you next time. Peace.