Can an AI really bag you a table at London’s hottest restaurants? I put ‘Instinct’ to the test

Last week I met a hotshot tech exec at a dinner and we started exchanging restaurant recommendations. To my surprise, when she got out her phone to make a note of one of the places I’d mentioned, she opened WhatsApp and started messaging someone.

Was it a case of a short attention span, or had she been less keen on my suggestion than she’d made out? Turns out, neither. She was messaging the autonomous personal AI assistant, Instinct, instructing it to book a table at the restaurant.

She explained that she uses Instinct for everything now. It watches flight prices and books them when they’re at their cheapest. It handles her inbox. It even helped her to plan “most of her wedding”. Did I want one of her 10 download codes to enter this wild, currently invite-only new frontier? Well... yes. Instinct was developed by Silicon Valley start-up Spear Street Technology, which in August closed a $350 million Series B funding round at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Instinct is free, quick to download and suitably nosey. “What do you spend most of your time on these days?” is its cringey opener and you can either reply with a word or go the whole hog and link it to your Google Drive and payment services. I’m wary of doing this and heed advice to give Instinct explicit instructions not to do anything without my sign-off. I ask it to find me a table at Dorian in Notting Hill and it comes back within a minute with a couple of options at 5.30pm next Tuesday. Can it get something sooner? Not right now, but it offers to check hourly for new tables.

Presumably, the hourly thing is to prevent it from getting “bot-blocked” — when a service stops an AI from performing tasks. OpenTable and Delta Air Lines are among platforms that have blocked or restricted AI agents. Maybe Dorian has too because it never managed to bag me a table.

The tech exec told me that, for the best results, you have to speak to Instinct “like it’s your bitch”. I could never — manners matter when there’s an AI apocalypse looming. Please remember that at the end of days, dear overlords.