The founder of Instinct said that more than 50% of the platform’s transactions involving its AI agent relate to travel, and that annual transaction volume is approaching $1 billion, alongside 10% daily growth, according to his statements. Its plans for restaurant reservations raise questions about fairness and prioritizing some users over others.
Noah Shinn, founder of the personal-agent platform Instinct, said that travel accounts for more than 50% of transactions on the platform, indicating that booking flights and hotels remains one of the leading practical uses for AI agents. He made the comments during an interview with investor Patrick O’Shaughnessy.
Shinn explained that the platform, currently available by invitation, is approaching $1 billion in annual transactions, but he did not explain how that figure is calculated or the period on which it is based. He added that the platform is growing at a rate of 10% per day, with transaction volume increasing at a similar rate. These figures came from the founder and were not supported in the article by independent data.
Travel as a Practical Test for Agents
Shinn believes that current travel agencies and booking websites play an important role in consolidating hotel, airline, and other service offerings into a single interface that allows direct payment. But he believes intelligent agents can offer an experience more dependent on intent and context, such as telling the system that the user needs to arrive in New York that same night and having it handle the urgent request instead of manually searching across several services.
These uses reveal the value of an agent when a task is distributed across multiple providers and requires comparing options and executing a transaction. But the available figures do not clarify the number of users, the average transaction value, or the proportion of bookings the agent actually completes compared with inquiries and incomplete interactions.
Debate Over Restaurant Reservations
Shinn said the company wants to reimagine restaurant reservations. He said the agent can check restaurant websites every five seconds and notify the user when an appointment becomes available, while also hinting at giving priority to reservations associated with important occasions.
This vision drew criticism from observers who warned that agents could potentially provide false information about birthdays or special occasions to obtain a table. They also noted that some restaurants may prefer regular local customers because they represent repeat business, rather than automatically giving priority to passing visitors.
What Is Actually Changing?
The challenge here is not limited to an agent’s ability to find an available slot; it extends to the rules governing access to it: Does the system merely monitor availability, or does it try to influence the booking order? The founder’s statements point to an ambition that goes beyond automating search toward redistributing preference among users, but the article does not include a clear operating policy or mechanisms for verifying users’ claims.
These comments come after Instinct raised $1 billion in a Series C round, at a valuation of $10 billion, from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue. The company has 14 employees and competes with Meta’s Muse and Khosla-backed Wajo in the personal-agent space.