SAN FRANCISCO — Instinct, an AI assistant valued at $2.5 billion, has launched an email capability that allows its agents to create and manage their own accounts, execute tasks autonomously, and interact with third-party services without user intervention.
Founder Noah Shinn said the feature lets Instinct contact businesses, request information, and register for services on a user's behalf by using a dedicated email address. Examples include inquiring about restaurant availability, requesting service details, or initiating product returns by contacting support and retrieving shipping labels.
The move addresses a practical friction point: users can forward emails to their Instinct agent to handle tasks requiring account signup or credential entry. The AI can process long email threads, extract deadlines and decisions, and operate autonomously until it needs explicit user input.
Instinct recently partnered with 1Password to handle logins to existing accounts, complementing this new email capability. The company also introduced a location-sharing feature that helps the AI identify nearby businesses and answer location-based questions.
The email addresses are reserved for early users; others can claim unique addresses through mail.instinct.com.
For Instinct's business model, the email feature poses an underexamined economics question: how will SaaS platforms, e-commerce sites, and service providers price interactions with non-human agents at scale. If millions of Instinct users delegate account creation and task execution to the AI, the cost structure for businesses changes—customer acquisition cost per human drops, support ticket volume from agents may spike, and the traditional email-per-human relationship dissolves. Some platforms may begin detecting and rate-limiting or charging for agent-originated traffic, creating a new category of friction that Instinct must then overcome or route around.
