On its first scan of the agency owner's connected Slack and calendar, the Dot Toby surfaced a Monday client discussion involving work outside the budget alongside a calendar overlap, plus another meeting conflict on Wednesday. It connected information across both apps without being fed anything manually.
She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.
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Cat (green glasses, plaid shirt), preparing for an interview with limited time, introduced 'Brio' (pink abstract avatar) as her AI. Screen recordings of a messaging app show her asking Brio to block calendar time; Brio confirmed a 2:00-3:00pm block and offered to run through questions.
Tech journalist Lance Ulanoff connected his personal Gmail to his AI 'Charlie' and asked it to check for anything pressing he had missed. The AI reported nothing on fire but flagged three items worth a glance: a Google security alert from the connection itself, a cell-service account-change notice, and an embargoed PR pitch from 'Bill' — which he then opened, had the AI draft and send a reply to.
Across the same two-week inbox-and-calendar test, the AI proactively flagged every one of the author's seven calendar double-bookings before the meetings occurred.
Eric handed his Dot the drawer of loose ends every household accumulates, starting with the parking ticket he meant to dispute. Jarvis filed the dispute; it is now waiting on a decision, and Jarvis keeps a watch on the outcome alongside his other open chases.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The author describes using AI to resolve a six-month-old travel medical insurance claim with Cigna. The AI called the insurer, was transparent about being an AI, conducted the call politely (impressing the representative), and — because final consent was required — called the author's phone and connected the parties so he could approve verbally.
Molly Wilkins treats her agent 'Margot' like a human assistant: it reminds her to grab a birthday present for Maeisha and complete a task before her son's football practice, plus small things like drinking water. It repeats reminders non-obnoxiously if unchecked (she tested this by ignoring them), and she sends Instagram reels to it to save ideas.
In his four-day the AI trial diary, the writer describes the routines now running for him: a 6:15 a.m. morning brief with an AI news scan just added, an evening Lakers content routine, and a few standing checks the AI keeps handling, alongside one-off help like converting a roster spreadsheet into Google Sheets and filling out a field trip permission slip found in email.
He runs his email agent on a 2018 computer he already owned. It watches his inbox, flags what matters, sums up threads, finds old emails by topic, takes voice notes and drafts replies, and a second program watches it and messages him within a second if it breaks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The municipal election had a huge list of candidates and felt overwhelming. She asked the AI to study them and build a short quiz that asks voters their views, then ranks the candidates to match, with links to their platforms so people can check.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
Eleanor Konik had the AI and AI team up on dashboards for local nonprofits. The AI did the early research and dug up grant chances the groups had not seen, like a group that pays for field trips to battlefields, a free textbooks program for private schools, and creative arts projects, and the lists were put behind a password for her friends to use.
Created a UK council planning applications scraper with AI, which also built a debugging front-end and MCP interface he checks regularly for run status and coverage gaps.
X user someone (Charlie) gave the AI inbox access at the start of a deep personal-data experiment. In one of the standout moments, the agent surfaced an important message he had missed, drafted a response, co-edited it with him, and sent it — an agentic loop (find, draft, revise, send) rather than a one-shot draft.
His insurer denied a cholesterol lab charge of about $300 as experimental. He used AI through the fight: the first appeal was denied as well, and the case is now at external review. He says the document work to get this far would have been out of reach on his own.
$300one time
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Ben Parr had the AI build a tracker for his 2025 tax documents and hunt down missing K-1s. The agent organized the paperwork and chased the missing forms.
He built geo-v.eu, a live calendar of EU political and economic events that runs to 2028. The AI Haiku judges each candidate event against his written editorial standard, the pipeline hunts for the outcome for five days after each event, and the site rebuilds daily from static files.
Gaby Hersham built a nightly automation in which the AI reads the roughly 20 school emails her family gets each week and adds the important dates to the family calendar, ending the manual trawl through newsletters and PDFs.
Before a speaking engagement, Ulanoff couldn't recall where he was talking or where to park. He asked the AI to find the original note from his contact, misspelling the contact's name.
Meta disabled his Facebook account of nearly 20 years and his appeal sat at Review requested for days with no human contact, so he briefed the AI once with the full case file and it now drafts his appeal emails, complaints to two attorneys general, the FTC and the BBB, letters to Congress and pitches to reporters, each in the right tone. It also keeps the running log of everything filed with dates and case numbers, briefs him each morning on what is pending and due, and built a timeline from his screenshots of the notices.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A man built a service so his own agents can send physical mail. He has used it to submit credit card disputes, credit bureau disputes and a gym cancellation, the letters people put off because they mean printing, envelopes and a post office trip.
His phone already blocks most spam calls. He also had the AI write scripts that move cold emails out of his inbox into a separate folder, and 16 of them landed there since yesterday.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
Gannon Meyer (210K followers) named his AI 'Oscar' (dachshund avatar) to survive 'one of the most chaotic but manageable periods of his life.' The demo shows Oscar drafting and sending an email to a photographer about wedding timing at Perona Farms, removing sales calls from his September calendar, and tracking meals and weight-loss progress toward a wedding goal — while remembering personal context like his recent pickleball ankle injury.