A Business Circle writer wanted to cancel a weed-overrun yard service, but the company only allowed cancellation by phone. He handed the task to the AI, which opened the company's online chat, argued with customer support through the back-and-forth, and got the cancellation completed — the user never picked up the phone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.