# Instinct: A Free AI Assistant That Actually Gets Things Done

Channel: Kyle Balmer | AI with Kyle
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9UD7Vs3APE
Duration: 24 min
Language: English - English
Words: 4713
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/y9UD7Vs3APE

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[0:00] I've been using a new AI Assistant to tidy up my life, and honestly, I am astounded. This does not happen very often, but wow. It is called Instinct. You've probably seen it going viral on Twitter. I want to run through what it is and give you an invite code. It is invite only at the moment, but I have a thousand plus invites.

[0:16] I'll give you the link in a moment. So I talk to Instinct through WhatsApp. I can send it voice notes. I can chat to it. I can type. I can explain what I'm struggling with and start working through the mess of my business and my life. And honestly, it's close to magic. I've used OpenClaw.

[0:33] I've used Hermes. I've set up my own AI Assistant via Codex and Claude Code. I've hooked into my business and my life and my slack and my business partner and everything altogether before. And it's still been a mess. It's always lacked a certain something. I've been chasing the perfect AI Executive Assistant. One that just kind of gets me and gets on with the job, not talking my ear off every time it needs to communicate with me,

[0:56] but instead just doing the damn thing without any fuss. I think I finally found it with Instinct. It is the closest I've had to texting a human Executive Assistant. It replies quickly. Sometimes it gives me a short answer. Sometimes it just reacts with a thumbs up emoji and gets on with the damn job. It doesn't write War and Peace every single time I ask it for an

[1:16] update on what I should be doing. So I'm finally moving the projects that have been left hanging all of this time, the follow up. So all the little things I've been sitting in the back of my head, all these ideas, they're being chipped away at. Finally, and it is a relief. If you run a business, you will know about this.

[1:33] Too many ideas putting you in every single direction. An artificial intelligence has made it worse because we can act on all of these things all of the time. Instinct has finally helped me get a lid on everything, and I'm very optimistic. By the way, this is not a sponsored video. I'm just very, very, very impressed with it.

[1:48] Also, it is free to use right now. I haven't had a separate AI bill for this. You do not connect it to the API. It is entirely free. So this is not only a free AI assistant, but a free artificial intelligence on a par with Claude or ChatGPT which is probably under the surface anyway.

[2:05] And it talks to you. It answers questions. It generates images. It can edit videos. Absolutely everything. I have invite codes over 10,000 of them. I've given away about 100 already, but there should still be plenty for you. You can get one through aiwithkyle.com/instinct. And the links will be below this video. So what I'm going to do in this video is show you through what it looks like, some genuinely useful examples to help you think about what you can use it for, and then showing you what

[2:34] I've personally been using it for in my own business. We do also need to touch on security because giving an AI, any AI, this much access is a serious decision. Right. Let's have a look. So I'm using it to get on top of the things that keep accumulating around my work. Before I get into it, my name is Kyle and I help business owners

[2:54] use artificial intelligence. If you want more practical examples like this, make sure you are subscribed. I use plenty of powerful AI models and tools already, ChatGPT Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes, all of the hits basically. But organizing my life in business still slips away. There are too many projects. There are too many ideas.

[3:13] There are too many surfaces that I'm working in. What I like here with Instinct is how easy it's to keep the conversation going from my phone. I basically live in WhatsApp anyway for my business. So having that as my main way to interact with the AI makes a massive difference. Let's have a look at what it looks like.

[3:31] This is Instinct. It basically looks like iMessage or WhatsApp because those are the surfaces that you're going to be using in. That is it. There is no fancy interface. There's no coding panel. You're going to be using it through WhatsApp or iMessage. Therefore, that's what it looks like. It also takes about three minutes to set up, which if you've ever tried to set up OpenClaw or Hermes,

[3:54] is probably surprising to you. There is zero complexity. Basically text the number and it will set everything up for you and ask for the various permissions and you are done. This is plug and play. It can work with the accounts that you choose to connect. We'll talk about security in a moment. And it can keep following a talk across separate conversations

[4:12] and later replies. And so far, I found that it's able to hold a lot of information and continue working with me without dropping the ball. That's something that I've noticed with some of the other agents. To make this concrete, this morning I had an invite to a conference, an email from my accountant to send some documents in, and a reminder that a podcast that I was on two weeks ago

[4:34] is finally coming out later today. More than that though, it went off and got me additional information so I could actually make a decision quickly. It is an executive assistant. So for the conference, it went and checked the conference and whether or not it would be worthwhile for me to attend based on the distance, based on my schedule,

[4:52] whether or not I could actually make it. It checked all of these things for me and it decided no, probably not, but it then gave me all of the details so I could make that decision myself. And I said no, I'm not interested. So it wrote back and said not at this point, but thank you. For the accountant, the documents required by my accountant

[5:10] in every year. So Instinct went back, looked through my emails and found the ones I'd sent last year to work out what these documents are and where it could find those documents. And then it asked for permission, which it doesn't yet have, to go and fetch those documents, compiling the email and send them off to my accountant.

[5:26] Very cool. For the podcast, it didn't just remind me, "Hey, a podcast that you're on is out today." It said, "Hey, you have talked to them and you said you're going to promote it." And so therefore it went and found that the link is live. Here it is on iTunes. This is AI Haven2Clue. And I'm on an episode that was published five

[5:46] hours ago called AI Could Kill Us All? Why are we still building it with Kyle Balmer? Could AI actually wipe out humanity? And if so, why are the biggest tech companies still racing to build it? So that podcast went live five hours ago. My Instinct went and got all the information. It also drafted a tweet and a video script for me to share.

[6:03] I did not ask it to. It worked out the best ways for me to promote this, gave me some ideas, and is helping me get that job done. This is basically an assistant that can work through that sequence and come back when there was a decision or result. It's not just given me to do it. It is getting along with as much as work as it can, and then coming back to me and saying,

[6:25] "Hey, this is what I've done. Here are the bits I need. Here's how we finalize the job." Actually helping me. Fantastic. The one thing, and this is new, I haven't seen this before, is that in Instinct, sometimes the best thing is for the AI to shut up. It just gives you the information that is needed, and then it stops talking. If you've ever used an AI assistant before, or even ChatGPT or Claude,

[6:54] you'll know that this is a problem. Here's a little example from my own chat. I basically mentioned at one point, "Oh, you know, you've been really helpful. I was being nice to you. I don't know why. You've been really helpful. Your model seems really good." All it did was give me a heart emoji. I know this is hardly a scientific breakthrough, the fact that the AI replied with a heart emoji, but when you were talking to something throughout

[7:17] the day, how it responds makes a difference. Sometimes, yes, I want a full explanation of what it's up to. Sometimes, I just need a thumbs up. I just need a heart emoji. I do not need it to write an essay every single time it talks to me because that is exhausting. It seems much better at knowing when a short reply or a reaction is sufficient and then

[7:35] moving on to something that is important. It knew that what I was saying didn't require an answer, so it did not give it to me. I think that's really cool. What I've been doing on a deeper level is using this to sort out my life, to tidy everything up. What does that actually mean? I have plenty of ideas, many, many business ideas, too many business ideas, too many projects

[7:56] I want to do, too many people I want to work with. What I struggle with is the amount of work sitting around those ideas and how we actually move all of those different projects forward. Follow-ups, bits of admin, things that other people are waiting on and things I've decided to stop doing that somehow keep coming back

[8:12] and probably should be buried for good. I've had to work through all of that with Instinct and I said, "Look, I need you to help me with overwhelm. I need you to help me get all of this together. Go and look at all the things I've been working on. Go and look at the wider plans and the goals.

[8:27] Let's work together to get a lid on this." One thing that is spotted immediately, there was a lot of work that was getting recorded, but then the ownership and the actual finishing were weak. Tasks existed, things that had been mentioned, but that didn't necessarily mean that anyone had gone to close it out, nothing actually got progressed, and then new projects came

[8:47] up, new things to do, and it was forgotten once again. I worked with Instinct on what I should be doing, what my team should be doing, and then what AI could help with. Basically, triaging into these different areas depending on what type of task it is. Then we did a very useful exercise on top of this, which was for each of the projects,

[9:06] for each of the tasks, do we keep it? Do we pause it and come back to it later, or do we kill it? Keeping the work that still matters and is important, revenue driving work, for example, pausing the things that can wait that would be nice to have but are not critical right now and killing the projects I've moved on from and probably are not going to come back again,

[9:24] and there were quite a lot of them, honestly. Having someone bring those decisions to me is super, super useful, because I can make that decision fast. I can deal with them instead of letting another list, another to do just pile up. What it's actually doing, which is really cool, is every single day, it, yes, it brings

[9:41] me the work that I need to be doing now. It's like, okay, this is Monday. Here are the things you actually have to do. For instance, there's a video I need to shoot today for a sponsor. That is non-negotiable. That's basic. Most assistants can do that. But what it is also doing is surfacing my backlog and drip feeding it to me.

[9:56] So it's not saying here are the 600 things you need to do. It's like, okay, here are three or four things that you've been working on. What do you want to do about these? Just bring them up to me and saying, let's start clearing out this backlog. And then when we clear them out, we clear them out for good. So for example, bookkeeping, every month or so, I need to go through my emails and pull out invoices and go to certain websites to grab invoices because some people don't email

[10:24] them. Absolute nightmare. In order to send them off to my bookkeeper and do it once a month, every couple of months or so. And it's a pain in the arse. And it takes a couple of hours of my time, which I do not have. So this is a recurring task that I have to deal with.

[10:38] I've just said to Instinct, you are going to go and collect all of this for me. You're going to collect up all of the bookkeeping information. You're going to look at the past bookkeeping records. I've sent to my bookkeeper and you're going to use that to model what needs to be collected. You're going to sort out my inbox, label things, put them in folders as needed, and send them

[10:54] off to my bookkeeping software. And it's done that, which now means I no longer need to think about that task. So what we're doing is we're going through all of the tasks, all of the projects, in a similar way, theoretically, this might be a dream, this might be Nirvana, but I can theoretically clear my plate.

[11:12] Make sure you're subscribed to see how that goes. I'm sure I will fill it with other things. I'm going to work through a couple of public examples because it's sometimes difficult to understand what you can use these tools for. So I'm just going to show you some examples so hopefully it can trigger for you.

[11:27] Oh, I could use it for this, I could use it for that because it is so broad. So the first one that I thought was really cool was this lady, Olivia Levine, says my boyfriend and I got on the Jumbotron last night at the US Open and he wanted the footage. I told him impossible, but I asked Instinct because why not?

[11:47] And of course, Instinct got us the video in 18 hours. So they were on a public Jumbotron inside of a stadium and they wanted to get a footage of it. I assume that is her there. And she sent, here we go, I'll work through this quickly, 11.08pm, I sent it our seats and a selfie with a simple ask of finding the in stadium footage by 11.20 and filed a USTA case, emailed the ticket office, the company that produces the US Open and Amex's US Open

[12:16] media contact. The production team's address bounced so it found the company's site form and went through that instead. Overnight, it went through ESPN's 22-minute highlight package, frame by frame. It can see, it can do video work as well, it has been editing videos for me. Again, this is free. Check in every crowd shot and found nothing, which made sense given it was only shown

[12:35] to fans in the stadium, it's on a Jumbotron. Then USTA said no, three times, not recorded or archived for public distribution, Instinct pushback and fought. 4.34pm, an awesome director at the production company saw the web submission from Instinct and replied, 5.02pm, the ask got passed to another producer who emailed back, "I had an editor cut out all the couples during the break at the time you mentioned." Turns out they were the very last couple in the montage, "I got an email 18 hours later

[13:03] with the sort after footage." Oh, and I didn't have to follow up with the Instinct agent once since last night. So it just got on with the task and got this footage by emailing real people and working out the series of steps required to get this video footage. Really cool. Really cool. I've got another one here. This is from Eli Weiss, "Saved $240 a year on

[13:26] my FiOS plan with one quick text Instinct." So sent the text via iMessage to Instinct, renegotiate my Verizon FiOS bill for $49.99 is at least like faster speed than 300 or lower bill. So basically go to FiOS, go to Verizon and work out my fibre bill. And it did. And it chat only no calls, I'll bring back the bill offers before anything changes on

[13:50] the account. Eli said, "Have you got the password?" And he said, "No, you need to give me the password." And then it went off and did it. It contacted FiOS and it negotiated it down from, I forget what it is, but managed to save $240 a year. Again, that's from one text message. So hopefully you can start thinking of all the things that you can set Instinct on and it will just go off and do them for you like if

[14:13] you were working with an executive assistant. It can just get these things done. Another one, Tamara Winter. Okay, not to be that person, but I gave Instinct, my fairly strict parameters for a new apartment and four days later I'd found it. I moved in two weeks back to Manhattan finally. So the parameters which gave me a voice note because you can send voice messages to Instinct was run a daily scan across StreetEasy Zillow, Craigslist lease break listing project studio

[14:41] plus one bed under $5K a month, it's how much it costs a Manhattan now. Leases and sublets mapped a no transfer rule to actual train lines. So didn't want to have to move trains. So every listing came with a real commute time, not vibes. So not waiting on a station platform at 10pm for 15 minutes.

[15:01] Sent listings as they posted with links. So it sent them through to her. When the elevator doorman rule landed, we scored everything already sent and crossed off every walk up retroactively, so removed all of the ones with stairs and kept only the ones with elevator, presumably or lift, excuse me, flagged edge cases as one liners instead

[15:22] of hiding them. Okay, so when no ones are quite close, instead of just not showing it to her, it would bring them up and say, this one's not quite right, but it might be of interest, here's the limitation. So first of all, walk up with a private terrace. So this was a walk up, which was excluded, which didn't want to have to walk upstairs,

[15:41] but it had a private terrace. So because that makes it special, maybe it's worth looking at. And when you spotted the takeover in September, September the 5th pivoted, verified the assignment terms, court errors in the rider, got them fixed, reviewed the 74 page original lease and ran the move-in checklist. So it went through and dealt with the legal as well.

[16:01] Again, these are just examples. The big question is what you can personally use it for, and that is based on your imagination. What I would say though is if you have jobs that you keep putting off, things like me and my bookkeeping and the fact that I hate that, these are the tasks you need to hand

[16:17] off and Instinct will be able to deal with them. It can also do some other really cool things like setting up your public pages. So it can make pages that you can use and you can share with other people using something called Instinct files. This is from the company's own demo here, but you can do this very easily yourself.

[16:38] Here it is, planning a dinner. You can see the guest shopping list recipe and you can send things to guests. You can do trip itineraries, apartment comparisons, et cetera. And it becomes an artifact that can be shared, which is really, really useful. Actually have someone in my community who did this with a meal that she prepared over

[16:55] the weekend. She took photos as she was going through the meal and kind of talked about what she was doing, what the process was. And it put everything together into a document showing how to prepare that meal, so like a recipe documentation even, according to her, she took photos while she was going through.

[17:11] It tidied up the photos. So it tidied up the photos to make them look more appealing for its final edit. So it has a image editor as well as a video editor, very, very cool. So I personally have mine hooked to Notion, because I use Notion as my database and document storage for the business, but you can also make these public documents as well outside

[17:36] of something in that Notion. Now all very cool. And again, if you want to join it, it is invite only but aiwithkyle.com/instinct. You'll be able to get a link. One thing I need to talk about, the proviso is data, your data and the accounts that you provide to it. So the same access that makes this useful access to your email, access to your passwords, access to potentially your payment details, all of

[18:03] these things make it incredibly useful. They can also create problems. This is very much a double edged sword. You might be giving a service private information account access and the ability to go and do things on your behalf and that could go wrong. So first up, you do not need to give it access to your Gmail account.

[18:20] You don't have to give it access to email. They actually have the ability to, when you create Instinct, it gives you a private email that you can forward to emails too. So it gives you a, I forget what the actual form of it is, but it'd be someone like Kyle Balmer at Instinct.com. I can forward emails to that and as a private inbox that only my Instinct can see, but it

[18:40] means I don't need to log into my actual email. So you can absolutely skip that as no problem. But the more access you give to your calendar, to your email, to what you were doing in your daily life. Giving it access to our business Slack, for example, so it can see all of the business

[18:56] communications, the more it can do for you. So as always, with artificial intelligence, this is to your comfort level. There's always going to be a risk of things like prompt injection. If somebody sends an email to me, for example, and it picks it up, that could be put through as an instruction to Instinct. I've put more security in place in order to deal with this, but this is always going to

[19:19] be an issue when we use these kind of assistance. And that could be also if the agent goes off and reads a website that has some kind of hidden instructions, which are able to override its instructions and redirect it. These things are always an issue when we have agentic artificial intelligence. So do definitely go through the privacy policy. They actually acknowledge unintended actions, including messages and payments and misleading

[19:46] instructions for third party, so they bring all of this up very explicitly. There are also data questions. It has a training opt out, but with exceptions, and the Google Workspace API has a specific exclusion from model training. This is in the privacy policies. I am, however, unsure what the actual model is inside of Instinct.

[20:05] I asked Instinct, hey, what are you running on? Is it ChatGPT? Is it Claude? And it would not tell me. So there's also the question of, is that information going to that model provider? Do they have their own model? I don't think so. I assume it's probably ChatGPT, but these are questions that we should be asking. And also disconnecting an integration like Gmail doesn't automatically delete what has

[20:27] already been collected buyer beware. Well, in this case, it is free, entirely free, but still, you need to be careful. Read the current settings and policy before giving it any sensitive material, just be sensible. So I'm personally very enthusiastic about what I've used, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to tell all of you to hand over every account that you own, something

[20:50] to you and your own level of safety requirements here. So what you can do, though, briefly mention this, you can send emails to its own email inbox that will be created, so you do not need to connect your Gmail. So you can forward an order confirmation, for example, you can forward the invoices in

[21:10] my bookkeeping example and ask it to help with a return. And it will be able to use just that email rather than having access to your entire Gmail. You can also start with public information, a few selected files, separate account containing only the things you want to use it. There are ways to limit your exposure here, or you can actually use it without having

[21:29] to connect it to anything at all. So personally, I keep my password manager and payment access out of Instinct. I haven't added them. I don't generally add them to any artificial intelligence, especially payment. If you are going to do that, if you are going to give it a credit card, well, one, don't give it a credit card, give it a charge card, someone is prepaid, so you can limit the problems

[21:52] if there are any, like, don't give it a credit card. Come on. And if you're uncomfortable with giving it any access, don't use it. Simple as that. You don't owe this new app just because everyone's talking about it does not mean you need to use it. Cool. So if you do want to use it, I have invites.

[22:10] It is invite only. It is also entirely free. I am not sponsored. I'm not affiliated. I'm not making any money from this at all, and it is entirely free anyway. If you do want to use it, though, it's at aiwithkyle.com/instinct. At worst, even if you don't connect it to any other services, you are basically getting

[22:28] a free artificial intelligence that seems comparable to ChatGPT or Claude. How long it stays free? I don't know, but until then, you get a free artificial intelligence in your WhatsApp, which is pretty cool. And then add your various tools based on your comfort level, start with something contained, a job that you've been putting off where you can actually check the result and then go from there and start to use it integrated

[22:54] into your life to make your life easier. So I'm going to personally keep using it. The early experience has been absolutely good enough to know that this is going to be very valuable in my life. And I want to push the limits and see what I can do with it, see if I can actually clear

[23:11] out my schedule and get all these to-dos off my plate. That would be life-changing if that is possible. If you do try it, tell me what you gave it and what exactly happened. I'd love to know in the comments, because I'd love to bring some of those examples into a follow-up video as well. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube for that if you want the follow-up and I will

[23:32] see you in the next one. Thank you.

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