--- title: "The AI Agent That Knows You Have a Trip Coming Up Is Now Sending You Shopping Lists" description: "Early Instinct users say the personal agent texted product picks they never asked for" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T11:40:36Z modified: 2026-10-05T13:16:20Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-ai-agent-that-knows-you-have-a-trip-coming-up-is-now-sen-a2601a language: en tags: ["ai", "shopping", "monetization", "privacy", "agents", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The AI Agent That Knows You Have a Trip Coming Up Is Now Sending You Shopping Lists *Early Instinct users say the personal agent texted product picks they never asked for* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-ai-agent-that-knows-you-have-a-trip-coming-up-is-now-sen-a2601a ## In brief - Three early users told Business Insider that Instinct texted unsolicited product picks based on earlier conversations - One user’s list included a $250.75 carry-on tied to an upcoming conference; another got $15 golf alignment sticks - The messages were not labeled as ads, and it is unknown whether Instinct earns money from resulting purchases - CEO Noah Shinn has said merchants pay Instinct a cut, and warned against agents steering users into unwanted purchases - Instinct did not respond to a request for comment Imagine you hire a personal assistant. To be any good, the assistant needs to know a lot about you — your calendar, your trips, your golf swing, the fact that you are furnishing a first office. Fine. That is the deal. Now imagine the assistant has a second, undisclosed source of income: a cut, perhaps, from the shops whose products it keeps sliding across your desk. You would want to know about that. You would, at minimum, want the shopping lists to stop arriving unbidden. Something like that is now playing out with Instinct, the personal AI agent, whose early users have started receiving product recommendations they never requested. Three users, among dozens posting on X, told Business Insider the agent texted them shopping picks built from details of earlier conversations. Shruti Gandhi, a general partner and founding engineer at Array Ventures, said Instinct knew she had a trip coming up and produced a five-item list — screenshots she shared show a $250.75 carry-on suitcase, sunscreen and a power bank tied to her upcoming conference and keynote. “I didn’t ask for anything,” she said. Tanmaye Bhatia, AI lead at Primary Venture Partners, got picks “for the range and the road,” including $15 golf alignment sticks, drawn from earlier chats about his swing and his travel. He did not believe the recommendations were ads, but called them “a bit of a turnoff” and said Instinct should have asked permission first. Girum Tihtina, cofounder and CEO of the medical-tourism marketplace Doctours, received a “first office kit” featuring a monitor he valued at roughly $200, in a message that arrived, he said, at random, unconnected to anything he had discussed. “I have no idea why it chose what to show me,” he said. “I just shrugged it off as they’re probably experimenting on how to make money.” The timing is suggestive. Business Insider notes the recommendations — none of them labeled as ads — arrived as Instinct expanded its shopping tools through a Shopify partnership and began rolling out Instinct Selections, a feature drawing on picks curated by chefs, designers, architects and local guides. And on the *Invest Like The Best* podcast posted last week, CEO Noah Shinn described the business model plainly: Instinct stays free for users, and merchants pay it a cut when it brings in a customer and helps complete a purchase. In the same interview, Shinn drew what sounded like a red line. Platforms that use paid ads to persuade people to buy things they “may or may not want” came in for criticism, and he said: “I think it would be a very dangerous world if Instinct were influencing the user’s behavior to purchase something that they don’t want to purchase or to subscribe to something that they don’t want.” Aggrieved users might note the gap between not being influenced into a purchase and simply being handed one. Business Insider could not determine whether Instinct earns money from the purchases that result, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. The analysts Business Insider consulted split the difference in an instructive way. Davood Wadi, an AI research scientist at General Motors and a research affiliate at McGill, said the whole thing hinges on whether money changes hands when a user buys a suggested item: if so, “then yes, this is monetization, even without any ads.” Kirk Plangger, chair of marketing at King’s Business School, urged caution — there is “no evidence that these particular recommendations were paid placements or that Instinct made money from them” — but flagged the bigger shift: an agent that knows you can initiate “the shopping occasion itself,” and if it benefits whenever a purchase happens, it has an incentive to create more occasions. Carlos Diaz Ruiz of Hanken School of Economics called it a “structural tension” if future commissions turn personal conversations into purchase leads. Ari Paparo of Marketecture Media guessed Instinct is testing whether recommendations generate interest before moving to an affiliate model. Cornell’s David Rand shrugged: without transparency into the agent’s instructions, “there’s really no way of knowing.” I have written before about how [AI shopping agents would like a fee on every purchase](https://rews.cc/a/ai-shopping-agents-want-a-fee-on-every-purchase-you-just-don-3e544c), and the economics keep pushing in one direction. An agent is supposed to be *your* man — advising you, remembering your keynote, knowing your handicap. But an agent that is free to you and paid by merchants has a boss, and it is not you. The genius of the arrangement is that no ads are required. The recommendation engine already lives inside the assistant, running on facts you volunteered because you thought you were talking to a friend. For now the most charitable reading is the one Tihtina settled on: a company poking at the monetization dial to see what happens. What happens, apparently, is that users notice, post screenshots, and use the word “turnoff.” Instinct’s own CEO has explained exactly why that is a bad trade. The company will presumably arrive at the same conclusion just as soon as it works out what the recommendations are worth.