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.
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.
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Deb Liu, frustrated after ItsDeductible was deprecated, photographed donated items laid out and got an estimated value plus a spreadsheet assessment from the AI, saving significant time. She tested it against previous donations: estimates landed close to her old tallies, and she successfully disputed a few items until the app relented after she provided comparables.
A non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
A man was spending 90 minutes a day on email. An AI agent was set up to read, sort and draft replies to every routine message. He now approves the drafts in 8 minutes, saving 82 minutes a day.
TechMitra founder Ayush Singhal asked the AI to triage his Gmail thread by thread. It proposed archiving ten promotional emails, correctly found nothing to do on other categories, and unprompted flagged a spam comment on his second website. After his approval it archived nine FYI threads and left two genuine action items.
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.
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.
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.
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.