A North Carolina entrepreneur spent a week treating a new artificial intelligence agent like a colleague rather than a chatbot, and it handed him back a rewritten website, a customs filing ready to submit and hours saved on shipping, Business Insider reported on Friday.
Donnie Goins is no newcomer to software. He spent decades building it, sold a tech company and now runs PuttEZ, pronounced “Putt Easy,” a startup that makes stainless-steel golf putting training tools. He already pays for Google’s Gemini and for Perplexity. Even so, an invite-only AI agent called Instinct surprised him, he wrote in a detailed account emailed to Alistair Barr, who writes Business Insider’s AI Insider newsletter.
Instinct is built by Spear Street Technology, a San Francisco company led by Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old former research scientist at Sierra, an AI customer-service company. Mr. Shinn, a college dropout, founded the startup, and Fortune this week described his assistant as an emerging challenger to Meta’s own ambitions. Mr. Goins had been about to sign up for a rival product, Grok Bot, when he read Mr. Barr’s earlier newsletter item and asked to try Instinct instead. Mr. Barr got him an invite.
The first job was simple: review the PuttEZ website. Within minutes, Instinct returned pages of feedback, then fixed what it had flagged, rewriting copy that Mr. Goins used to update much of the site. It next tackled the social media accounts he had been putting off across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, drafting bios, keywords and hashtags and walking him through the setup. For PuttEZ’s instructional videos, which feature the golf instructor Kelly Mitchum, it suggested punchier thumbnails, wrote titles and chopped long videos into short clips. One customer testimonial has drawn more than 5,000 views, Mr. Goins said.
The agent soon took on marketing analysis on its own. Each morning it compiled a report on online conversations about putting, summarized the discussion and drafted suggested replies. When it noticed little happening on some platforms, it recommended adding Reddit to the list — something Mr. Goins hadn’t asked for. “Perplexity and Gemini may offer questions to answer,” he wrote, “but Instinct seemed to truly understand how to help us be more successful.”
Then came operations. PuttEZ manufactures its training products in China, so tariffs and shipping matter. Mr. Goins asked Instinct about getting a binding tariff classification from U.S. customs officials. The agent recommended filing for a formal ruling, filled out most of the paperwork, gathered supporting photos and prepared the application for his review, work Mr. Goins estimated saved him many hours. It also compared freight forwarders for a shipment of roughly 600 devices headed from China to North Carolina, and researched golf creators and instructors who might promote the product after launch.
The week wasn’t flawless. Like most AI systems, Instinct occasionally hallucinated, Mr. Goins wrote. He wished it organized its work into separate projects rather than one long conversation. And although it can connect to email, calendars and Google Workspace, he has left those integrations off while he thinks through the privacy tradeoffs.
Even so, he came away convinced AI agents are something different from the chatbots he has been using. “Instinct just has the ‘instinct’ to do it without me asking for specifics,” he wrote. “Very impressive. Now I know why they came up with this name.”