Instinct and similar AI agents have crossed from hobbyist projects into usable consumer products by solving the hard problem of maintaining context about your life—and this shift will force every company to rethink how customers interact with their services. The real change isn't smarter AI; it's that software can now act on your behalf instead of you navigating websites and apps yourself.

• Instinct works because it remembers context across interactions (booking a restaurant, then moving it multiple times) without requiring users to re-explain themselves each time, which previous agents failed to do reliably.
• Companies are building their own agents (banks, airlines, CRMs) when they should instead make their services callable by the customer's single agent—most businesses still block bot traffic because they haven't internalized that the bot is now the customer's representative.
• This shift is bigger than mobile because it moves the workload from humans operating interfaces to software executing outcomes; the customer no longer navigates the pub's booking form, the agent does it for them.
• Payment infrastructure like Stripe's Link wallet is critical infrastructure—it lets agents spend money without holding passwords or card details, removing a major friction point for adoption.