I think I speak for all of us when I say the AI assistant market feels crowded.
By Alliekmiller · October 23, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I think I speak for all of us when I say the AI assistant market feels crowded.
We’ve got Instinct and Meta Muse, Grokbot and Tab, OpenAI dots and Hermes. And yesterday, Anthropic launched Claude Duet.
AI labs, please. Some of us are trying to sleep.
All of these are the same new kind of AI assistant where you don't have to open an app and type a prompt. They sit across your tools - like your email, Slack, calendar, and files, watch what's happening, and proactively message you first when they think something needs you.
I had early access to Claude Duet and tested it against the others. With chatbots, the skill was asking good questions. With these, I think the skill is deciding what's allowed to interrupt you and how you manage those escalations.
Duet was the most proactive of the bunch for me, and it flagged a lot. Anthropic says as much in its own launch notes: it can misjudge how urgent something is. Which is fair. It has no way of knowing that one client email can wait until Thursday and another can't (until you tell it).
So before you connect any proactive agents to your inbox, I'd write down three things:
1. What counts as urgent for you this month. Be specific: a deal, a deadline, a person.
2. What it can do on its own or what needs your OK. Duet asks before it sends, pays, or signs anything. I prefer that default.
3. What it should never touch (ex: maybe avoid a debit card).
For me, that list ended up mattering more than which tool I picked. It also goes with you to whichever assistant you settle on, and with this many launches in a few months, you might switch more than once.
My full side-by-side is in yesterday’s newsletter (including a hilarious failure from an AI calling a store for me). Link in comments.