A year ago, as AI was supposedly coding software engineers out of a job, it still couldn’t reliably book dinner . And some of the biggest tech companies around were struggling to build an assistant that could use your apps without creating more work for you.

When Apple delayed the Siri upgrade that would have allowed it to take action within apps, software chef, Craig Federighi, offered a blunt explanation: “This just doesn’t work reliably enough to be an Apple product.”

Amazon’s upgraded Alexa+ did manage a dinner reservation when a reporter from The Verge tested it in July 2025. The request was for Friday. The agent booked Thursday.

Now, a new crop of assistants is finally getting those chores right—often enough that the appeal of handing off an errand isn’t tainted by the idea of taking on a second job babysitting AI. We’ve catalogued some of the most interesting in Forbes’ inaugural Agentic 20 list .

In August, an invitation-only startup called Instinct became an obsession for Silicon Valley’s venture capital class. Investor Sarah Guo, whose firm Conviction was an early backer, described using it for restaurant reservations, marathon entries and camping bookings. All you had to do was connect your accounts and send requests by text. Simple.

The enthusiasm brought money in at a remarkable pace. A $75 million Series A in early August valued Instinct at more than $500 million. By August 26, a $250 million Series B had pushed that to $2.5 billion. On September 28, it announced another $1 billion from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation.

The company has just 14 employees.

Instinct’s 23 year-old founder Noah Shinn says it’s earned its reputation simply by delivering on a promise that AI has so far struggled to keep: getting things done right. “The first time I really started to get excited about the product we were building, I had a very simple realization: Instinct just works,” he told Forbes, borrowing Apple’s iconic marketing line. “Our goal was to build a personal assistant, and Instinct behaves in a way we’ve been waiting for AI to deliver on since its inception.”

Shinn says Instinct’s user base is growing an average of 10% daily, despite the invitation-only beta, with 80% retention among users who connect accounts like Gmail. He did not specify a retention period.

The bigger companies have begun fielding competitors as well. Meta’s Muse launched in early September with a cuddly mascot, Jolly. It now has more than 5 million downloads, and overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 app on the App Store on September 18. Meta’s stock is up 27% since its launch; Forbes reported a single day gain of more than $25 billion to Mark Zuckerberg’s Smaugian fortune.

OpenAI launched Dots late last month: cartoonlike assistants designed to be “always on”, working on your behalf and suggesting other tasks to tackle.

So why now? Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder of work-assistant startup Town, credits stronger AI models late last year and better tools for operating browsers and computers. By summer, those tools were cheap enough for everyday use. Meanwhile, cheaper voice technology has made AI phone calls practical, too.

One standout use case is travel, says Shinn. Instinct is on track for $1 billion in annualized transaction volume, with travel accounting for half its volume. Beyond that, it’s varied and mostly mundane—booking rides, buying groceries, etc.

Others have found more creative assignments. One uploaded photographs of themselves and their entire wardrobe, turning Instinct into a stylist that produces daily outfits, complete with generated images of how they will look. Another user, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn, told Forbes in September that Instinct helped recover about $2,000 from old insurance plans and a dormant bank account, submitting claims after securing permission to use his signature.

Brianna Guay enlisted an assistant for her sister’s bachelorette party. Her “Bach Bot,” built with SpaceXAI’s personal assistant Grok Bot, helped source limo drivers, coordinate vendors and track deliveries. It even inspected her Amazon order to see how many vases she had purchased when coordinating with florists for a flower purchase.

The technology is still far from perfect. In August, investor Jason Yeh said on X that Instinct booked a restaurant with a $200 cancellation fee when he had asked it to find available reservations. Context is important. Greze acknowledges that reliability remains uneven and some websites, notably Amazon, resist access by agents.

Wajo AI’s fallback is humans.

CEO Shivani Poddar says trained contractors intervene when its personal AI agent, Fo, encounters an obstacle like website verification checks or a messy hotel negotiation. The idea is to finish the errand instead of punting it back to the person who delegated it.

“[Customers] want the job done” she says. ‘They don’t want a ball dropped on them.”

Privacy is an ongoing concern, and there have been a few instances that have rattled users’ trust. In September, an Instinct user complained that the agent appeared to reveal another person’s information. Shinn said it had invented the information rather than leaked it. In another incident, Muse user Matt Robb said the agent shared his address with a Facebook Marketplace buyer who then showed up unexpectedly. Robb later acknowledged selecting an “Allow Always” setting but said he had expected to approve offers. Meta said there had been no privacy breach.

Observant rivals are pitching privacy alongside convenience. Town, whose CEO has a background in financial services and banking, says it does not train on users’ data and deletes most information after 15 days. Poddar says Fo is designed to prevent private conversations from spilling into group chats.

Shinn is already asking users to delegate more. Instinct’s new network lets them link their agents with those of their friends and family, to handle coordination between people, like booking meetings.

That means persuading people to trust software with personal information and tasks more consequential than buying flowers.

“People have a little bit of agent fatigue,” Poddar says. “But also, they don’t have something they can truly trust to get shit done.”