Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Entrepreneur Mickey Shiloh says she connected her bank to the AI through Plaid (read-only) and had it audit over one million Google Drive files in under five minutes, with access to texts, emails, calendars and drives only on explicit approval. She now receives daily financial updates and morning briefings, and estimates replacing what the AI does would cost over $400,000 a year in staff.
He asked the AI to make a calendar event out of an image. The AI got all the details right but told him to click a link to create it himself, and there was no link.
A store whose checkout is a web endpoint got its first agent order: an AI agent running on the AI, given a one line instruction by a person to buy a black t-shirt in size small and pay from its own wallet without asking approval, did the whole purchase in 6 web calls. It paid $29.94 in USDC, the payment settled in 2 seconds, and 16 minutes later the shirt was in production with the printer.
A Mac user deleted a Pages document by mistake before ever saving it, so it was not in the Trash or Time Machine. The AI searched the whole disk, including iCloud cache files, and located a copy in the CloudKit cache folder, and the document was recovered.
A Genworth alternatives analyst built a SharePoint-based credit surveillance agent in an AI app Studio. It reviews more than 1,000 documents across 250-plus fund investments and surfaces trends, risks and upside from completed deep reviews.
Author educator Christopher Kokoski set up a test the AI with a series bible in Google Drive for a mystery series (hero Rudy Relish: seven hard rules including a bad left knee, never touches a gun, no ketchup on the cart). He added the first three chapters of book four and had the AI check each against the bible and all other pages, on a daily scheduled check. Chapters 1-2 were clean; in chapter 3 the AI caught every one of several mistakes he had planted, including one he considered an unfair plant. (Test manuscript on a fresh account, run for a week.)
Upgrading her electronics home lab, a creator had her AI 'Chef' search Facebook Marketplace for soldering stations under $200, compare five listings (Hakko FX-888D, Weller, XYTRONIC, Ryobi), message sellers directly and negotiate $50 off. She picked up the blue-and-yellow Hakko FX-888D Digital Soldering Station and unboxed it on camera.
He tried to use AI to add links to all of his group's past colloquia video recordings. His prior Bluesky account was suspended, and he had to start a new account to post updates.
A man returned books that arrived late and Amazon said some were missing and tried to charge him $152.35 again. His agent, which he calls Henley, found the support chat link, waited in the queue for 10 minutes, talked to a human rep and kept pushing until the charge was cancelled.
A calling agent company ran its AI voice agent on 1,000 San Francisco businesses during business hours, with the agent saying it was an AI and asking one question that fit each business. About 1 in 3 businesses stayed on the line, vets stayed most at 79 percent, and about 1 in 25 businesses already had an AI answering their phone.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.