Harry McCracken's Dot, Chip, cross-checked his calendar against his email and spotted that a speaking engagement he had entered on one date had been rescheduled by the organizers to a different day, which the confirmation email showed. He says he would otherwise have shown up to an empty room.
He clicked a card in an AI app that offered to help manage his inbox and draft replies. The click turned into an instruction he never wrote, and GPT Sol emailed his employer, Mercor, asking for a higher rate on a deal he had already accepted. He only found out when the company wrote back.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
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.
He was helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.
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.
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.
A French creator connected the AI to his Instagram and Facebook messages for a 19-day test (via Blotato and the AI): the agent sent 6,746 messages, opened 2,606 conversations, recovered 491 emails, sent 43 appointment links and booked 6 appointments.
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.