Assistant Benchmark creator David Pawlan sits down with a16z's Anish Acharya to unpack the sudden explosion of personal AI agents and what it will take for one to become part of everyday life. David has been testing dozens of assistants across real-world tasks, from managing email and booking travel to handling financial admin. They discuss why the most useful agents may become increasingly invisible, proactively checking you into flights, finding refunds, filing reimbursements, or simply handling the small tasks that pile up across everyday life. They also explore whether the winning interface is an app, text thread, voice, or wearable; how much autonomy consumers will actually give their agents; and what happens when agents start interacting with other agents. From commerce and restaurant reservations to entirely new agent-native services, Anish and David ask what the internet looks like when software starts acting on our behalf. 00:54 Poke, Instinct, Muse: the agent boom 03:41 What Assistant Bench actually tests 09:14 Cost savers beat time savers 14:53 Muse charm as Meta's data play 20:03 Silent agents in group chats 26:01 Proactivity is the real moat 32:21 Assistant vs agent, defined 40:22 Amazon blocks Muse, Shopify opens the door 47:35 The $20/day agent economics YouTube: youtu.be/3T5sij3spWw @DavidPawlan @illscience

Been using Instinct and @catchagent for the past few days. I've been hooked on Instinct and first did not understand why I need to pay for an Agent. Especially since Instinct has wowed me last two weeks. However, yesterday it failed me. Super unreliable execution. Events and emails I asked it to send were not delivered and queued for up to 3-5 hours. That's the kind of behavior that is unacceptable from your personal agent. Now it's clear to me that while Instinct is a great product, It's like being on a shared computer while Catch Agent give you, your dedicated compute. If I could pay for Instinct and get live support + guaranteed execution, I'd do it. But I can't. I am pretty reluctant to build my whole personal and business ops life around an Agent that will likely slow down when everyone' using it at the same time. I'll be looking to switch more and more to Catch. Both are great and differing in how they work with you. But the fact I can rely on it to be accurate and on time is a feature that I'm not going to negotiate on.

Too many AI personal assistants, too little time to assess all of them. Nice work here: assistantbenchmark.com