Direct answer: The newest place for an AI assistant is not another app on your home screen — it is your text messages. A fast-growing crowd of AI agents now lives inside SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram, letting you book, plan, remind and research simply by texting, and TechCrunch’s October 2026 roundup counts more than twenty of them. For UK small businesses, this matters because it points to where customer communication is heading: fewer apps, more conversations, and assistants that act rather than just answer.
What happened
On 24 October 2026, TechCrunch published a roundup of what it calls the top AI agents that can live in your text messages. The premise is simple and, for anyone who has watched people ignore yet another app download, persuasive: rather than installing something new, you text an assistant the way you would text a person, and it gets things done. It can remember context from earlier conversations, connect to the apps and services you already use, and complete tasks on your behalf — scheduling an appointment, organising a calendar, researching a trip, sending an email, making a reservation, shopping online, or reminding you about something days later.
The roundup arrives at a moment when the agent market is moving very fast. Its buzziest name, Instinct, raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation and then, in September 2026, raised a further $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. Other names in the list have raised significant money too: Town raised a $55 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in June 2026, Fambot raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding, and Tab emerged from stealth in early October 2026 with a $300 million valuation. This is not a quiet corner of the market. Investors are betting heavily that the assistant of the future will live where people already spend their time, and people already spend their time in messages.
That said, a roundup is not a product launch, and it is worth being clear about what this story is. TechCrunch has not announced a single new agent; it has surveyed a field that has grown up over the last year. Many of the agents listed are in private or public beta, several are US-focused, and pricing, availability and features will change. The value of the story for a small business owner is not any one agent on the list, but the pattern: messaging is becoming a platform for AI assistance, and the businesses that understand that shift early will be better placed to use it.
The agents, in plain terms
The field splits roughly into four groups, and understanding the groups is more useful than memorising twenty names.
The first group is the general-purpose personal assistants: agents that aim to do a bit of everything. Instinct is the flagship here. It is an always-available agent you reach by text or voice, connected to your email, calendar and Google Workspace, and it is designed to take actions rather than just answer questions. Its users have reportedly used it for everything from planning trips and buying groceries to booking tickets and cancelling subscriptions. In September 2026 it began giving users dedicated email addresses for their assistants, so the agent can sign up for services, contact businesses and follow up on requests without filling the user’s own inbox. It has also begun rolling out support for placing phone calls. Instinct remains in private beta, so most people cannot try it yet.
Martin is a similar generalist, reachable through SMS, phone, WhatsApp, email, Slack and its own iOS app. It manages calendars, email, reminders, tasks, notes and communications, sends messages and makes calls on your behalf, and delivers daily summaries. Subscriptions start at $21 a month, which puts it at the pricier end. Maverick, which describes itself as an “AI companion who lives in your texts”, works on iMessage, fixes typos, cancels subscriptions, schedules meetings from voice notes and settles group-chat dates, and notably asks permission before acting — a small design choice that matters a lot when an agent can spend your money. It is free in beta on iMessage, with a Pro tier at €27 a month. Rene, available on iMessage, Telegram and WhatsApp, turns natural language into tasks, reminders and summaries, and can also browse, write code, shop and create slides and images.
The second group is the family assistants, and it is surprisingly crowded: Fambot, Ohai, Ollie, Orbits and Szn all aim at households. Fambot calls itself a “chief of staff” for families, pulling together school communications, sports activities, meal planning and calendars into an organised plan, and sending a nightly summary of the next day, including details like school uniform or packing requirements. It connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook and WhatsApp, launched in beta in early September 2026, raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding, and is free during beta, with a Netflix-like subscription expected later. Ohai similarly turns messages, forwarded emails and voice requests into schedules, reminders and plans across a household, with subscriptions from $9.99 a month. Ollie, launched in June 2026, stands out for being one of the first family-focused assistants to achieve SOC 2 compliance, a widely used security standard; it offers a free tier and paid plans from $25 a month for 150 messages. Orbits, backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun fund and others, goes further into household services, including requesting quotes from tradespeople and communicating with service providers. Szn, which says it has served more than 7,500 businesses across 16 countries, coordinates tasks and follow-ups through a single thread of texts, voice notes, photos and forwarded emails, and can make calls and send emails on your behalf.
The third group is the work-focused and inbox-tidying assistants. Caddy lives in iMessage for iPhone users and RCS for Android users, and turns the information scattered across your phone into actions: an appointment buried in an email gets added to your calendar, a shopping list sent by a friend gets tracked, follow-ups get chased. It has been in public beta since April 2026. Comma is designed to carry tasks through to completion across your browser, computer and files, while remaining reachable through Signal, Telegram and WeChat; it checks its own work, surfaces completed tasks for review when a decision is needed, and sends daily briefings. It is free to start and open source. Ask Proxy takes a different angle, aiming to anticipate needs before you ask, with a personal version at $1 a day and business pricing from $15 per employee a month for large companies and $23 for small teams. Its work version promises to get employees back to work faster while keeping personal data off company systems. Town, aimed squarely at professional life, gives users a “Townie” that learns how they work and handles recurring professional tasks across email, calendars, documents and Slack.
The fourth group is the specialists. Miso applies the text-assistant idea to travel, combining AI trip planning with a dedicated travel team over iMessage, taking loyalty points and preferences into account. Stanley is a content assistant for creators on iMessage, Telegram and the web, turning voice notes into scripts, captions and social posts and maintaining a content calendar. Poke, which launched in March 2026, became notable when Apple approved it as the first AI agent on the Apple Messages for Business platform in June 2026, and its parent company was then acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valued in the low nine figures. Tab lets users delegate everyday tasks — ordering groceries, finding birthday gifts — via iMessage or WhatsApp. Wajo’s Fo, launched publicly in September 2026, is perhaps the most ambitious on identity: Fo has its own email address, phone number and payment card, so it can interact with businesses without the user handing over personal credentials, and when it cannot finish a task itself, Wajo says a human assistant steps in. Skye, from Signull Labs, takes yet another approach as an “agentic homescreen” for iPhone that surfaces cards, suggestions and audio briefings rather than waiting to be asked. Underdog, a privacy-focused assistant in invite-only beta since early October 2026, runs entirely on the user’s device, with Mac and Windows support now and phone versions planned, and promises never to include advertising.
Why this is happening now
Three trends have collided to make text-message agents possible. The first is capability: today’s AI models are good enough to hold a multi-step conversation, remember context, and use tools like calendars and email without constant supervision. A year or two ago, an agent asked to “sort out dinner on Friday” would have needed hand-holding at every step; now it can check calendars, find a restaurant, book a table and confirm, with a human approving only the final step.
The second is distribution. Getting someone to download a new app is hard and getting harder; app stores are crowded and attention is scarce. But almost everyone already opens their messages dozens of times a day. An agent that lives in messages skips the hardest part of building a consumer product — getting installed — and meets users where they already are. That is also why WhatsApp matters so much in this story: in the UK, WhatsApp is where customers already talk to friends, family and increasingly to businesses, and several of these agents — Folk, Martin, Rene, Tab, Fambot — are built to work there.
The third is money. The funding numbers in this story — Instinct at $10 billion, Town’s $55 million Series A, Tab’s $300 million stealth valuation — show that investors believe personal agents are a platform shift, not a feature. That money is funding the engineering needed to make agents reliable, and reliability is the whole ballgame: an agent that books the wrong flight or cancels the wrong subscription is worse than no agent at all. Expect the next year to be defined less by new names and more by which of these agents prove they can be trusted with real tasks.
What it means for UK small businesses
For a UK small business, the most useful way to read this story is not “which agent should I download?” but “what does it mean that customers are getting used to delegating by text?” There are five practical implications.
First, your customers’ expectations are shifting. If a customer can text an agent to book a table, reschedule an appointment or chase an order, they will increasingly expect to be able to text your business the same way — and to get a fast, competent reply. Businesses that still rely on phone-only contact or a contact form that nobody checks are going to feel this pressure first. WhatsApp Business, which many UK small firms already use, is the obvious bridge: it lets customers message you in the app they already live in, and it is the channel where several of these agents already operate.
Second, there is a real opportunity in delegation for the business owner, not just the customer. A tradesperson who can text “chase the three quotes I sent last week” or “move Thursday’s job to Friday morning and tell the customer” and have it done is saving the admin hours that currently eat into billable work. The agents in the work-focused group — Caddy, Comma, Town, Ask Proxy — are aimed at exactly this. The catch is that most are early, US-focused or in beta, so the practical move is to trial one on low-risk tasks first, such as reminders and calendar tidying, before trusting it with customers or money.
Third, think carefully about data before connecting anything. An agent that can act for you needs access to your email, calendar, contacts and often your messages. That is a lot of trust to place in a young startup, and under UK GDPR you remain responsible for your customers’ personal data even when a tool processes it on your behalf. Before connecting an agent to a business account, check where data is stored, how long it is kept, whether it is used to train models, and whether you can export and delete it. Prefer tools that offer clear data-processing terms, and never connect an agent to your main business bank account or give it payment credentials unless the provider offers a dedicated, limited credential — as Wajo’s Fo does with its own payment card — rather than your own.
Fourth, watch the permission question. Maverick’s choice to ask permission before acting is a model other agents should copy, and it is the behaviour you should demand from any agent you let near your business. An agent that can send emails, make bookings and place orders in your name should confirm before it spends money or commits you to anything, at least until it has earned your trust over months of correct behaviour. If a tool does not offer approval steps, treat that as a red flag, not a minor omission.
Fifth, consider building rather than just adopting. For many UK small businesses, the highest-value version of this trend is not a consumer agent at all, but a simple automation built for your own business: a WhatsApp assistant that answers common questions, takes bookings, sends reminders and hands over to a human when it gets stuck. That keeps the customer relationship and the data with you, it works on the channel your customers already use, and it does not depend on a startup that might pivot, get acquired or shut down — as Poke’s acquisition by Cognition shows can happen quickly in this market. The consumer agents in this roundup are a sign of where the technology is going; a business-owned automation is how most small firms will actually capture the value.
The honest limits
Enthusiasm for agents should be tempered by how young this market is. Most of the agents listed are in beta, which means features, pricing and even availability can change without much warning. Several are US-only or US-first in practice, even when they work on global platforms like WhatsApp; SMS-based agents in particular may not work well with UK numbers or UK services. Pricing that looks cheap in beta — free, or a few dollars a month — will not stay that way if these companies need to become profitable, and a business that builds a workflow around a free beta can find itself forced onto an expensive plan or stranded.
There are also capability limits that no roundup can fully capture. Agents are good at well-defined tasks with clear information, and much weaker at ambiguous ones: a message like “sort something nice for Mum’s birthday” requires taste, budget knowledge and judgement that an agent can only guess at. They can also make confident mistakes, booking the wrong date or misunderstanding a name, and those mistakes are more costly when the agent acts autonomously. And there is a security dimension that deserves attention: an agent with its own email address and payment card, like Instinct’s or Wajo’s Fo, is a new kind of attack surface. If someone compromises your agent, they may gain the ability to act as you across many services at once. Strong account security, limited permissions and approval steps are not optional extras here.
Finally, there is a question of what happens to the human relationship. Small businesses win customers through personal service, and an agent that handles every interaction efficiently but impersonally could erode exactly that advantage. The best use of these tools is to remove drudgery — reminders, scheduling, chasing, form-filling — so that the business owner has more time for the conversations that actually build loyalty, not to replace those conversations.
Who to watch, and what to do next
If you want to follow this space without drowning in it, watch three things. First, Instinct: it has the most money, the most ambition and the clearest push toward acting on your behalf, including calls and its own email addresses. Whether it opens up beyond private beta, and how it prices itself, will set the tone for the market. Second, the WhatsApp-native agents — Folk, Martin, Rene, Tab and Fambot — because WhatsApp is where UK customers already are, and an agent that works there has a much shorter path to usefulness for a British small business than one that needs iMessage or a US phone number. Third, the privacy-first and on-device approaches, like Underdog: if agents are going to hold the keys to your digital life, the ones that keep data on your device have a structural advantage in trust, especially under UK and EU data protection law.
For a small business owner reading this today, the action list is short. Make sure customers can reach you by message — WhatsApp Business is the simplest step — and that someone actually replies promptly. Trial one agent on low-risk personal tasks before trusting any of them with business operations. Write down your approval rule: nothing gets spent or promised without a human saying yes. And if you want to go further, talk to a specialist about a WhatsApp automation built for your business, rather than waiting for a consumer agent to fit your needs by accident. The age of the text-message assistant has started; the businesses that benefit most will be the ones that use it deliberately, not the ones that hand it the keys on day one.
FAQs
What is an AI agent that lives in text messages?
It is an AI assistant you talk to by texting, on SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram or RCS, instead of opening a separate app. It can remember context, connect to your calendar and email, and carry out tasks like booking, researching or sending follow-ups on your behalf.
Which text-message AI agents are available?
TechCrunch’s October 2026 roundup lists more than twenty, including Instinct, Folk, Martin, Maverick, Poke, Fambot, Ohai, Ollie, Comma, Caddy, Ask Proxy and Wajo’s Fo. Most are in beta or early release, and availability varies by country and platform.
How much do text-message AI agents cost?
Pricing varies widely. Several are free in beta, including Fambot, Caddy and Maverick’s basic tier. Paid plans range from around $8.33 a month for Folk Pro to $25 a month for Ollie and $21 a month for Martin, with business pricing higher.
Are these agents safe to connect to my email and calendar?
That is the key question. An agent that can act for you needs deep access to your accounts, and some, like Instinct and Wajo’s Fo, even get their own email addresses and payment cards. Check each provider’s security practices, start with limited access, and never give an agent your main banking credentials.
Should my UK small business use a text-message AI agent?
For most small firms, the smart move is to watch and test rather than commit. The tools are young, several are US-focused, and pricing and availability will change. A better near-term step is often a WhatsApp automation built for your own business, where you control the data and the customer relationship.
Sources and further reading
This article is based on TechCrunch’s 24 October 2026 roundup, “Here are the top AI agents that can live in your text messages”, with company details as reported there. For how agents are already being used by small firms, see our guides on AI agents for small businesses in the UK and automating lead follow-up with AI agents. For the related story of voice agents that run locally, see our coverage of Nvidia’s Nemotron Bolt voice model.
