AI Agents Start Making Phone Calls for You as Instinct and Meta Step Up the Race

AI agents that can autonomously handle tasks are moving into a new frontier: making phone calls on your behalf. As covered by overseas tech media, startup Instinct now offers a mobile app that can call businesses for you to book appointments or ask questions, and the service has already passed several million downloads. Meta is reportedly experimenting with similar capabilities inside its own AI agents, aiming to automate interactions with restaurants, service desks, and customer support lines.

To work, these agents need deep access to a user’s contacts, calendar, and in some cases real‑time call audio so they can understand the conversation and act accordingly. That makes them far more useful than simple chatbots, but also raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and what happens when the AI makes a mistake. The article notes that regulators in the US and Europe are likely to scrutinize this space, and ethicists are questioning whether AI systems should be allowed to pose as humans during calls. Offloading tedious phone errands is appealing, but users may soon have to decide how much autonomy they are willing to grant their “phone concierge” AI.