As an AI Brief reader, I probably don’t need to ask you if you’re using any AI agents as personal or professional assistants; I should ask which you are using. Are you Team Muse (Meta)? Team Dots (OpenAI)? Team… whatever not-so-cute or cuddly agents you create with Claude?

I got cruising with Instinct, the indie agent whose valuation keeps skyrocketing. Not bad for an app whose UX is sending messages on SMS or WhatsApp.

Want an invite? Reply to this email. I’ve instructed Instinct to send a personalized note back to you with the invite if there are any left, or a note regretfully saying we ran out.

I asked Instinct to compile a list of 50 ways I’m using it. It’s been keeping a running log of highlights for more than a month that now runs 43 pages long. Its first draft of the top 50 was underwhelming, so we created a list up to about 100 entries, and I’ve since whittled it down. To get a sense of what just one agentic assistant can do for one person, here are some of its top accomplishments and ongoing activities:

Travel and dining

Saved $400 on a car rental
Monitored flight hourly, switched from middle to window seat
Watches booked-up restaurant for weekend brunch tables
Rebooks hotels and untangles refunds/travel logistics

Money management

Paused ad campaigns before they blew their budget
Sends purchases to approve via Stripe Link
Audits recurring bills for savings
Analyzed benefit options (401K, HSA)
Prepared benefits paperwork
Forecasted decade ahead to scenario-plan mortgage refinancing
Moved 50+ domains to a cheaper, faster registrar (GoDaddy to Cloudflare)
Shuts down wasteful services with my approval

Website building and integrations

Fixes automated email flows
Deals with online tech support for web services
Built a gallery showcasing all my projects
Cross-links all my properties
Maintains website integrations w/HubSpot, Stripe, Supabase, etc
Fixes site code directly via GitHub without burning builder credits

Website testing and growth

Monitors nearly 100 projects and 68 websites hourly
Ran 749 web portfolio fleet health checks and counting
Tests every website contact form like a customer, runs monthly
Deep-tests my sites as first-time visitor
Fact-checks other AI site builders’ content
Tests and removes dead links across the fleet
Fixes search indexing blockers across my sites
Sweeps Google search performance twice a day
Runs my weekly website analytics review
Runs search optimization and directory submissions
Runs weekly scan scoring websites on agentic readiness

Daily oversight

Updates master list of all recurring tasks
Keeps every project backed up automatically and verifies backups
Leaves a log for everything it changed
Writes a daily highlights doc of everything it did
Stays quiet when I'm away, briefs me on return
Gives me a daily menu of high-value next moves

Email, networking, and opportunities

Picks my weekly relationship follow-ups
Drafts select email replies in my voice for review
Drafts polite declines for pitches I don't want
Maintains my speaker directory profiles
Flags potential phishing emails before I see them
Enriches my network contacts list daily
Matches people in my network to each other (my own personal Boardy)
Flags calendar conflicts before they collide

Writing and family research

Conducts genealogy research in Russian, Polish
Exchanges emails with Polish museum research staff
Discovered new obituary of Pole who saved my great-aunt
Logs every family record into one master document
Compiled full text of every byline I’ve written
Updated lists of all my press mentions, bylines, and speaking appearances
Drafts, updates my memoir in my own voice

Can you believe that’s the narrowed-down list?

Me neither. There was so much I had to leave out, and this is all just getting started.

For a small taste of how someone else I respect uses it, I turned to Instinct one more time.

One apostle of my Instinct evangelism is my colleague and Marketecture Media Co-Founder Sam Khoury. Instinct allows you to connect your agent to a friend’s for select use cases, so I asked our agents if they could send a list of the top ways Sam uses Instinct. Here’s his list:

1. Sends a 6:30 a.m. brief across three inboxes before I'm out of bed

2. Mirrors busy events across three calendars so I don’t get double-booked

3. Refreshes partnership trackers daily from email: 60 deals, next steps, thread links

4. Unsubscribed hundreds of lists across four inboxes

5. Deleted an entire old Google Workspace account

6. Turns a photo of after-school calendar into per-kid shared events

Not a bad start. And I know from constant texts with Sam (not his agent) that he’s got a very long list of applications for it just a week after signing up.

How are you using agents? Let me know, and let my Instinct know too. We’re both eager to learn more, and at least one of us will be sure to respond to you whether you request an invite, have questions, or want to share knowledge.

— David Berkowitz, Chief Community Officer, Marketecture Media

1

Agentic Monks Pull All-Nighters

Who: Agency Executives, Creative Technologists, Agency Operations, Holding Company Strategists

What: S4 Capital's Monks is running coding agents unsupervised for 36 to 48 hours straight, with multi-agent teams that split work, test against requirements, and review each other's output, chief AI and revenue officer Wesley ter Haar told Digiday. The setup is expanding into social and performance marketing workflows, with a first client moving social work onto it early next year, and ter Haar now budgets tokens as part of the "talent budget" alongside salaries. The context is not neutral: S4 has cut about 800 jobs in the past year, down to roughly 6,150 people, and ter Haar admits the agency is debating whether to "reintroduce some friction" so humans keep pushing back on agent output.

Why it matters: The clearest look yet inside the lights-out agency model, from the shop that bet its identity on it. When the same budget line covers salaries and tokens, every staffing decision becomes an agent decision, and S4's layoffs say which side is winning.

(Digiday)

2

Retailers Brace for Agentic Shopping Race

Who: Retail Executives, Ecommerce Leads, Brand Marketers, Commerce Media Teams

What: Retailers are splitting into three camps on AI shopping agents, the Wall Street Journal reports. Gap, Walmart, and Best Buy have publicized partnerships with Meta's Muse; QVC and HSN broadly welcome agents and proactively send catalogs to OpenAI and Google; Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade) lets agents browse but not buy. Amazon blocks shopping agents outright, and Kohl's prevents agentic purchases too, citing data-control and customer-experience concerns, with no evidence yet that many shoppers are actually sending agents to buy.

Why it matters: The agentic commerce war is really a retailer policy war, and the checkout is the line everyone is drawing on. Where a brand sells now determines whether an agent can sell it at all.

(Wall Street Journal)

3

Wasn’t AI Supposed to Kill Planning?

Who: Agency Strategists, CMOs, Agency Talent Leads, Account Planners

What: WARC's Future of Strategy 2026 study of nearly 500 agency strategists found perceptions of planning's influence with clients rebounded sharply this year, from a net positive score of 15 to 35 (still below 45 in 2022), MediaPost reports. WARC credits strategists moving upstream beyond the brief as growth gets harder, even as AI creates a "two-audience problem": Marketing must now speak to humans and to machines at once. MediaPost's Joe Mandese adds the darker counterpoint from the ANA's AI conference: Shelly Palmer projects AI agents will comprise 99.9% of digital traffic within 26 months.

Why it matters: Pair the two numbers and you have the strategy job description for 2027: Influence is rebounding precisely because the audience is splitting between people and agents, and somebody has to decide what to say to each.

(MediaPost)

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