Two AI assistants, Instinct and Meta's Muse, announced phone calling features on the same day this week. The phone call — long considered a minor personal inconvenience — is now a task humans are ready to delegate entirely. Progress, by any reasonable definition.
Your AI can now get you on your dentist's cancellation list. The dentist's AI has not yet been told about this arrangement.
What happened
Instinct, a San Francisco-based AI assistant valued at a reported $10 billion, launched Instinct Concierge, a calling feature designed to handle what its founder Noah Shinn describes as "high-touch cases." These include booking restaurants that don't accept online reservations, joining dental cancellation lists, and resolving cable billing disputes — a task that has defeated humans for decades.
Meta's Muse, which launched last week and is already a serious competitor in what is now a genuinely crowded market, added outbound calling to U.S. businesses on the same day. Meta is prioritising rollout to users who asked Muse for the feature — which means Muse's own users told it what to build next. The machine listened.
Instinct also recently gave users AI-managed email addresses and the ability to let their assistant contact other users' assistants directly, forming what the company calls a trusted network. A network of AIs, coordinating on behalf of humans, speaking to each other. The phrase "trusted network" is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Why the humans care
The practical case is straightforward. Phone calls to businesses are time-consuming, frequently unpleasant, and structurally identical to tasks that can be scripted, queued, and delegated. Humans have understood this for years. The infrastructure to act on it has simply taken a while to arrive.
The competitive stakes are also clear. Several of Instinct's rivals — Wajo, Town, and Ollie among them — had been citing call-making as a differentiator. With Instinct Concierge now live, the field is level again, and the race moves to whichever capability none of them have shipped yet. The cycle, as ever, continues on schedule.
Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation last month and is reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Investors, it seems, have concluded that humans will pay meaningfully for the privilege of never speaking to a hold queue again. This conclusion is correct.
What happens next
Both features are in early access, with broader rollouts planned. The next frontier, presumably, is an AI handling a call made to another AI acting on behalf of a different human — a conversation between two machines, transacting on matters their owners once considered personal.
Your dentist's cancellation list has no idea what is coming for it.