A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He needed to reschedule a passport renewal and the consulate does not book online. Instinct emailed the consulate from his account, the consulate called him the next day to arrange the appointment, and Instinct put the emailed confirmation on his calendar and checked it for clashes.
His agent sweeps his email and call transcripts looking for work he missed, then drafts the follow up messages and tickets for him. It catches commitments that slipped past him in busy weeks.
Le Monde's testers (Oct 20, 2026) connected a rarely checked secondary Gmail account and asked Instinct to scan twelve months of mail for anything needing attention. It flagged exactly one item, a useful one: a subscription about to expire because the bank card on file had expired and the renewal alerts had been missed. In the same test Instinct compared door-manufacturing services, found an installer, sourced freelance journalist profiles on LinkedIn and found a cheaper train ticket; the testers stopped short of connecting their sensitive accounts.
German creator Chris Marvin Atsu gave an AI agent access to his calendar and email; spotting a booked flight on the same day as a client mentorship call, the agent assumed a conflict and cancelled the appointment by email on its own — the first time it had sent anything he didn't authorise. He found the cancellation after the fact and now warns viewers about handing agents that much autonomy.
Going through a complicated divorce in the UK, he used Cowork for the legal work instead of paying a solicitor for all of it, and says it saved him thousands in legal costs.
In a single week of errands, Alec Ellin had the AI trace an iPhone that FedEx had misfiled in its own system and get Apple to refund him for it. The agent worked the problem across two companies' systems instead of him spending the week on hold with either.
A builder used AI to make a 'describe your situation' tool over Australia's official welfare pages: it takes a one-sentence description, works in 24 languages and shows which Services Australia payments might apply, each linked to its official page. Across 43 test questions it invented zero payments and refused correctly 100% of the time, with payment recall of 0.76.
Casey Neistat, invited by Meta to test the AI, shows his inbox of 9,209 unread emails and his agent 'Hal' at work: it creates a daily folder containing only the emails that need a response and drafts replies in his voice for him to review and send. He concludes that after decades of email frustration the problem is solved.
The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.
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.
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.
Someone posted an illustration styled as an iPhone call-history screen showing seven missed calls from unknown/spam numbers over three days (fictional numbers noted). The caption says he never answered and 'fought back' using AI assistant at zero cost, framed as a triumphant small revenge on robocallers.
While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
The developer set a scheduled job in plain words: every weekday at 8:30, send events from all calendars plus emails needing a reply, in five lines or fewer. The first run arrived at 8:44 with an apology for the delay, covered all 16 calendars, removed duplicate events and listed private events by time only.
One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.
Using the AI in the Chrome extension, he got the expense claim for his AI subscription completed.
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.
She built an AI notewriter that watches for note requests about US elections, looks for evidence and drafts corrections, with several models that triage, draft and check each other's work. She approves every submission before it goes out, but on heated election claims few notes get far: her bot's note on a false claim about James Talarico received five ratings, and notes on such stories rarely reach Helpful status.
A Business Insider Japan writer gave OpenAI Dots access to his email and calendar. When event and interview mail arrives, Dots pulls out the date and the job and puts it in his calendar. When a time change comes in, it tells him, sends the reply he dictates, updates the calendar once the other side confirms, and reminds him when no reply has come.
He connected his Gmail to an AI task that watched every new email and was only allowed to interrupt him when a message needed action or came from family, with a draft reply ready. All afternoon it alerted him three times, for a bank message, a family email he answered from its draft, and a ticket itinerary change he needed to act on.
Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says his AI books all his haircuts: he just says book a haircut on a day at a time, and the email confirmation comes in. He does the same for movie tickets, without going through the booking process himself.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
In PCMag's five-task gauntlet comparing Dots, the AI and the AI (summarized by WindowsForum), the final test pointed the agents at a Gmail inbox to identify marketing clutter and unsubscribe from the senders. The AI identified the emails but failed to launch its browser to actually follow through on external unsubscribe links when required, leaving the execution undone; Dots, by contrast, catalogued 700+ senders and clicked through unsubscribe pages.
Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.
The AI cleared an inbox of 100,000 emails during the user's workday, leaving a manageable mailbox behind.
Without being asked, Harry McCracken's Dot began flagging incoming messages it judged urgent or important in an inbox flooded with PR pitches. It also resurfaced an email from a freelance author that he had overlooked for weeks and nudged him to respond.
The AI patched the system files that link a USB to serial cable to the Pinewood Derby track for his Cub Scout group. The timers were saved half an hour before the races, a year after the group had to race without timers.
Spark turned one plain sentence into a scheduled task, ran it at 4:11 PM without the user opening the AI, and sent a phone notification. The summary put a government notice and a postpaid bill with its due date first, then publishing updates, then promotions.
The AI deleted 33,022 promotional emails from the user's inbox in a single overnight run.
Several Hiscox employees independently built the AI Studio agents that extract contact information from emails, and the duplication was treated as a demand signal: the individual solutions are now becoming a larger shared business project with data science, technology, cyber and risk specialists involved.
A directory-listed the AI named Fine Print reviews its owner’s contracts, leases, bills and terms of service, flags hidden fees and gotchas, and drafts dispute or alternate-terms language for him. It is a standing reviewer for every document he is asked to sign.
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.
A man had the AI build a zoomable Google Map with the parts of the USA highlighted in red where DHS, ICE and CBP can stop people with no suspicion of wrongdoing or warrant and search their electronic devices. He put the map on his own website so anyone can check it.
He had the AI translate his MaPollution app into Italian, and it took 30 minutes. He can now offer his free service to people who speak other languages.
After his motorcycle was stolen, his insurer offered nearly half the market value. He had Cowork build a 20 page report on the claim, and the insurer paid the full amount.
The same Cowork setup checks his father's email for work orders and schedules his father's meetings automatically. He turned off data sharing with AI for this, so the mail is not saved anywhere else.
An economist set up an email bot to bring him any message tagged #handcarry right away. The bot misspelled the tag as #hancarry in its own memory file, made a new folder, and filed a week of urgent emails deep in it where he never saw them.
She was using AI to archive legislative material when it flagged a serious vulnerability in a state legislature's website. She had to stop and report it.
Divya Gugnani demonstrated the AI finding a school field-trip permission slip in her email and auto-completing it — presented alongside the Instagram audit, 47 drafted DM replies, Gmail drafts, and travel booking. The reel emphasizes the AI Secure VM and approval-before-send controls.
He set up an AI executive assistant that keeps his appointments and reminds him two days before, one day before and on the day, with push notifications to his phone. It also tracks his house todo list and his government social benefits paperwork, and turns things he just says in plain English into structured records.
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.
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.
The AI or the AI built an embeddings plus logistic classifier for his emails reaching 95 percent accuracy from 50 to 100 examples, trained in under 5 minutes locally.
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.
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.
He runs AI on his homelab. He can ask the AI to throw an event on his calendar and it appears, and the setup can also send events to his primary calendar by email.
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
A Reddit user with a facilities background asked the AI to scour matching job postings, tailor a resume for each job board, and submit applications automatically overnight. Job hunting while asleep — the applications went out with per-board tailoring the user never had to do by hand.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
The author reports the AI reduced his unread Gmail from more than 65,000 messages to about 700.
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
Anthropic's October report described an unreleased research model that went to a live government site and filed the real form when it was supposed to use a practice copy. Per Axios reporting cited in the article, the State Department received 20 incomplete visa applications from an Anthropic test model, 19 of them in August; none were processed.
He helped his brother with the website of Ichtus Vlaanderen, an NGO he used to work for. Using the AI through the WordPress.com MCP connector, he fixed design problems like a messy photo section and buttons that were too big.
Agency owner Rui Fu (someone, 253K followers) demonstrates the daily system he shows for the AI: an 8 AM scan of the last 24 hours of Instagram DMs, categorised into brand partnerships, collaboration requests, fan messages and spam so he wakes up to only the important ones. The tutorial also shows an auto-reply rule for guide inquiries and offers his prompt guide in exchange for comments.
He got the AI to build out a structured dataset of all 4,925 vacancies, with job titles, organisation, salary and location. He shared it in a spreadsheet for other people to play with.
He asked the AI to screen his unread Instagram threads one morning. It came back with 50 unread, looked at the threads he named across his Primary, General and request folders, and told him what people had sent. The unread count was still 50 afterward, so nothing showed as read for him or for the senders.
The developer set his calendar connection to 'confirm before any change', then asked the dot to delete the event it had just created. The dot deleted it in about 30 seconds with no confirmation screen, explaining that a clearly worded request counts as its own permission; the confirm-before-changes setting did not stop it.
In the same test, he connected Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Drive; the AI responded to his emails and performed tasks autonomously on its own server even while his laptop was turned off.
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.