A few weeks ago, my friends and I were visiting Maine, and I asked Instinct to build our itinerary. It did, I approved it, and off we went. What I didn't realize until later was that in the background, it had emailed a distillery we were planning to visit (from my email) to ask if they'd give us a tour outside their normal hours, since our dinner reservation was at an awkward time. They said yes. They opened two hours early and gave us a private tour. I only found out afterward, and wrote about it here.
That was the "oh wow" moment for me. Not that it saved me a few minutes. It quietly did something on the backend to make our day better than the one I'd have planned myself.
Everyone talks about agents like Instinct, Grok Bot, Town, etc. as productivity tools. And in a way, they are. They handle your correspondence, your calendar, your forms, your bookings (with very real concerns about privacy and security along the way). But that framing misses the thing I actually find exciting. The way I've come to think about these tools is as engines for IRL. They don't just clear your plate. They push you toward real life instead of away from it, and they do it in four distinct ways, each one building on the last.
First, they give you the time.
The stuff these agents take off your plate is the impersonal stuff: planning, research, forms, reading reviews, the admin layer of being alive. I have friends who block off one full weekend day every month and call it their admin day. Insurance claims, appointments, the kids' calendar, the hundred small things that pile up when you're running a life. That's exactly the kind of thing these tools should eat. It's not human-to-human work, and it gives you nothing back. It just sits between you and the people you'd rather be spending the day with. That's a full day they could be spending doing far better things, like drinking Aperol spritzes with me on a patio somewhere 🥂
Second, they plan the thing.
Getting the time back is one thing. The reason most plans die is the coordination tax. Someone has to find the date that works across five calendars, pick a place that's roughly equidistant, check it's open, book it, and send the invite, and each of those steps is a place the whole thing can quietly fall apart. This is exactly the work an agent is built for. It reads across the calendars, holds the constraints, makes the reservation, and puts it on everyone's schedule. The dinner that used to take a week of back-and-forth to lock in just happens.
Third, they make the thing better.
This is the part I didn't expect. Any productivity tool saves time; you usually just fill it with more work. What makes these agents different is that they don't only free up the planning; they make the thing you planned better than the version you'd have put together yourself.
Finding a great night out normally means hours of open tabs: which new spots are actually worth it, which restaurant is having a moment, what's on at the museum this month, which one-off event or show is quietly happening the same weekend and never made it onto your radar. These tools do all of that at once and hand you a pre-vetted, elevated plan, or the top three to choose from.
They even hold the specifics that make a plan work for you. I'm celiac, which normally turns eating in a new city into its own research project: cross-referencing the places I want to try against the ones that are genuinely safe against what to order once I'm there. My agent knows that, folds it in, and points me at spots I might never have found on my own, or that would have taken me hours to discover.
Fourth, and this is the one I'm most excited about, they keep the thing happening.
Maintaining relationships is genuinely hard, and it's nobody's fault. People have kids, demanding jobs, family scattered across time zones.
Wanting to see your friends was never the problem. Bandwidth is.
It's the invite that gets moved four times and the thread that dies before anyone picks a date. But an agent doesn't run out of bandwidth. You can hand it a standing intent and let it hold the line:
I want to see my siblings (who live on other continents) at least twice a year.
I want to see this group of friends at least every six weeks.
I want a weekly date-night with my husband.
And then it just works in the background, watching the calendar, noticing when a gap is opening up, and starting to plan the thing before you've even realized it's been too long. If your friends set the same kinds of intents with their own agents, the two of them will soon be able to resolve it amongst themselves. You could hack a version of that together today, but natively, I'd bet the functionality is a year out or less.
Notice what all four have in common: Every one of them is the tool doing the impersonal work.
This is what I think AI is actually for. Not AI art, not AI friends, not a bot to have your conversations for you. The work worth handing off is the administrative, uncreative, impersonal stuff that nobody would miss doing: the scheduling, the research, the forms, the coordination. That's rung one, productivity, and it's the least of it. The other three are about real life: planning it, improving it, and defending it against the slow entropy of a full schedule. Hand the machine the setup and keep the parts that were always supposed to be yours. The dinner itself. The people at it. The conversation once you're there.
None of this makes your life more IRL by default.
That isn't what these tools do on their own. If you'd rather pour the freed-up time into more work, or into gaming, or into scrolling, you will, and they'll happily enable that too.
But if being in the room with real people is something you're actively trying to do more of, this clears the exact friction that was getting in your way. In "Terminally IRL," I argued that the more agents sit between us, the more valuable it becomes to remove the interface entirely. This is the other half of that: agents that strip out the impersonal interface so the personal one has more room to exist.
That's the part I keep coming back to, and why after so much AI slop and technology taking people away from each other, I’m excited to see technology that can genuinely make an impact on bringing people together.