\n Personal AI agents, like Instinct, are part of an emerging category of apps that act as digital personal assistants. Users provide the app with credentials like email logins and credit card information and then ask the aps to do things for them.\n <\/p>\n
\n People have used AI assistants to find new apartments<\/a> and cancel subscriptions<\/a>, as well as to manage their own calendars and make doctor\u2019s appointments. Instinct recently raised $350 million, and in September, Meta released Muse, its own personal AI agent<\/a>, which has been downloaded more than 2 million times already.\n <\/p>\n \n These AI agents have been developed at a time when airlines, insurance companies and utility providers are making it increasingly difficult to speak to a human in order to solve a problem. After years of yelling \u201cagent\u201d during automated customer service calls in the hopes of reaching a real person, it\u2019s little wonder why people are trying to automate their annoying tasks, even if it means unleashing a new avalanche of bots onto the internet.\n <\/p>\n \n Making restaurant reservations on their creator\u2019s behalf is one of the AI assistants\u2019 most visible use cases, especially as diners face the growing headache of navigating different apps and credit card reward tiers just to book a meal. Many popular restaurants have abandoned phone numbers and email addresses<\/a> in favor of managing everything via their reservation platform of choice.\n <\/p>\n \n Apps like Dorsia, which charge a yearly membership fee of up to $25,000, and gray-market reservation marketplaces like AppointmentTrader have created a class system where deep-pocketed diners can cut to the front of the line. Personal AI agents now threaten to make that even worse.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe are dehumanizing the last standing experience that is still totally human,\u201d said Roni Mazumdar, the co-owner of several award-winning restaurants including Dhamaka and Semma in New York.\n <\/p>\n \n Mazumdar is concerned that if some people are able to walk around with a bot in their pockets that can constantly scrape a website looking for a table, it\u2019ll reinforce a system that is already frustrating restaurant operators where reservations are gobbled up by clout chasers.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWhen the entire system is gamed, you create an environment where those who are excited by a place can\u2019t even go, but someone who doesn\u2019t really care gets to say, \u2018Yeah, I went there\u2019 for bragging rights. It\u2019s just a lose-lose proposition,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cFor as long as we\u2019ve had hard-to-get-into restaurants, we\u2019ve had people trying to hack the system. These bots are nothing new,\u201d said Ben Leventhal, the founder of the loyalty platform Blackbird and a co-founder of Resy. He said that Resy did what it was supposed to do by enforcing its terms of service, but that the industry will have to adapt and evolve as people use new tools.\n <\/p>\n \n Leventhal added that the AI assistants do provide some easier avenues to bad behavior among diners, though, and reservation platforms need to find a way to deal with that. \u201cPeople want to skip the line, and obviously that\u2019s not going to scale for legitimate platforms,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n Jeremy Mustakas, the COO of Jean-Georges Restaurants in New York, said that AI tools have been helpful in streamlining some of their back-office operations, but that humanity is still at the core of what restaurants do, even if costs some efficiencies. \u201cNot every interaction or task needs to be optimized,\u201d Mustakas said. \u201cOur work requires patience, discretion, even spontaneity. AI can\u2019t read the room the way a great hospitality professional can.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Like other AI systems, these personal agents don\u2019t always behave the way people want them to. Brian Distelburger, a tech entrepreneur, also got banned from Resy<\/a> for using an overeager agent to look for a table at, yes, 4 Charles Prime Rib. And in August, Jason Yeh, a venture capitalist in Los Angeles, said that he prompted his Instinct bot to look for restaurant reservations for a trip to Tokyo.\n <\/p>\n![\"Some](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/dyj18n-20260922223849163.jpg\")
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