AI Personal Assistants Are Finally Having Their Moment

Ayear 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.

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.

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

Wajo AI’s fallback is humans.