Instinct gives its agent a dedicated email address, marking the start of delegating accounts and transactions to AI

The Instinct smart assistant platform, valued at $2.5 billion, has launched a new feature that gives its smart agent a dedicated email address for each user via the domain mail.instinct.com, a step intended to enable the agent to create and manage digital accounts and communicate with companies on behalf of the user without flooding the user's personal inbox with messages and registration confirmations.

The company's founder, Noah Sheen, explained that this step represents the first stage towardempowering the agent to own its own accounts and operate themindependently, as most daily tasks go through email, from opening accounts on various services, to confirming bookings, and to contacting stores and tracking updates that require continuous attention. The new system also allows the agent to email restaurants to inquire about special requirements, to ask businesses about available appointment times, or to subscribe to services needed to complete the assigned task.

The new feature gives users the ability to forward incoming messages directly to their smart agent's address to handle complex procedures, such as processing product returns; the user can forward an order confirmation message to the agent, which then contacts the store's support team, provides shipment details, negotiates between replacement or refund options, and returns to the user with a shipping label ready for printing. The agent's email can also be added to group conversation threads to follow discussion progress, or supplied with a long email chain to identify pending decisions, outstanding tasks and their deadlines, with human intervention limited to requesting guidance only when needed and the agent operating autonomously in the remaining stages.

This step follows a series of recent updates the company has made to expand its agent's capabilities, including a partnership with OnePassword to manage login credentials for existing user accounts without manual intervention, and a partnership with Stripe in August to streamline payments, travel and appointment bookings, and product purchases, as well as adding a location-sharing feature to help users discover nearby stores, map routes, and save a history of previous places such as parking spots and restaurants.

This shift imposes a new operational reality on the e-commerce and customer service sector in the Middle East, especially in Gulf markets and Egypt, where sales and support platforms rely on traditional identity verification via email and phone; the emergence of automated email addresses that manage purchase and return processes introduces a layer of separation between the retailer and the actual consumer. Operations managers and technical teams in the region will need to redesign customer-service workflows and fraud-detection systems to deal with software agents that negotiate on behalf of buyers with precision and speed, which requires updating transaction verification standards and discarding the assumption that the other party in an email is a human awaiting a reply during business hours.