If my personal AI agent were a human assistant, I'd give them a big raise

Last month my son and I took the train to Lisbon so he could renew his U.S. and Swiss passports. We had two embassy appointments, one free afternoon and a lot of logistics: trains, buses, lunch, luggage and something fun to do. I wanted to see how far Instinct, the personal agent that lives in my WhatsApp, could take that load.

A few weeks earlier I wrote about Instinct asking for my children's passport details, and a privacy policy that didn't back up what it told me. So I set firm limits. It gets no personal information and no access to my email or documents. It does get my Airbnb account and a card that only works on Airbnb, with a low limit I watch closely.

Within those limits it did a lot. It found three apartments near the U.S. Embassy, the same three I would have picked, booked the top one when I said yes and messaged the host. The day before we left it sent me the check-in instructions on WhatsApp, which I would otherwise have missed. Then it built us a full trip briefing: every walk with a map link, which bus and train to take, aquarium tickets and the lunch menu so we could choose on the train.

In Lisbon, every question became a voice note or a photo. When I couldn't work out which local train to take, I sent a picture of the departures board and had the train, platform and time back in seconds. What that gave me was time with my son, at the aquarium instead of on a platform trying to decode the timetable.

I still made every decision. I've never had an assistant, and if a person had handed me a briefing half this good, I'd have been thrilled. That's why I'd give them a raise.