Instinct just announced it would not run ads, yet immediately began curating stores and products for its users.

Beating AI News: Personal AI agent assistant Instinct has launched a new feature called Selections, which integrates recommendations from real human experts into the agent. The company partners with local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides, and other professionals, who curate restaurants, travel itineraries, and products in their areas of expertise. Instinct then delivers recommendations tailored to user preferences. For example, if a user is looking for a restaurant, Instinct will draw on a list curated by local chefs; for home goods, it will suggest options matching the user’s style and budget from products recommended by independent designers. Noah Shinn said the team aims for these recommendations to be significantly higher quality than those from standard web searches and other chatbots. Notably, Shinn recently made clear his opposition to ad-based models in his first public long-form interview. He argues that personal agents hold large amounts of user data, so allowing brands to pay agents to persuade users to purchase items they wouldn’t otherwise want would create major conflicts of interest. Instinct plans to offer free access to users, generating revenue by taking commissions from merchants for orders driven by the agent. Selections is not currently classified as an ad product. Instinct has not stated whether merchants can pay to be included in recommendation lists, nor has it disclosed whether collaborating experts are compensated. However, if Instinct does eventually rely on transaction commissions for revenue, Selections will face a pressing question: Will its recommendations be tied to how much the platform stands to earn from them? Shinn did not address this in the interview.