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.
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
Jack created a recurring daily website-check goal by chat in about a minute, then deleted it by chat. The Goals tab itself was slow to load (once 25 seconds, once stuck on placeholders).
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.
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.
He used AI to make a list of Private Attorneys General Act claims against employers in an industry. The list was made in support of an organizing drive, and he says the tool is almost always helpful on tasks that involve a lot of data.
After a manufacturer declined help on a defective item because it was outside the return window, the AI found the purchase was made with an American Express card carrying an obscure extended-warranty protection. It submitted the claim on the author's behalf and obtained the refund.
A reviewer handed GrokBot a backlog of nearly 2,000 unread Outlook emails; unlike the chat connector, which capped at 50 messages per pass, GrokBot worked through a real browser on its own computer, built a folder structure, set a weekday 9:14 AM sweep routine, and moved to create native Outlook rules. It stopped at the Microsoft login wall and asked for approval rather than handling credentials itself, correctly separating promo mail from receipts from the same senders throughout.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try 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.
Every month the family benefits system asks him for a fresh proof of domicile, and a forgotten upload stops the payments. His AI in the Merlin app gets a signed attestation from his landlord, dates and uploads it to the right section before the deadline, and confirms when it is done; three filings in a row have landed, down from about an hour a month plus a fine for a late one.