An AI that writes code is useful. An AI that writes code is useful. One that answers a funeral home’s overnight calls,

negotiates with suppliers or helps businesses handle the grunt work nobody wants to touch is useful to a much larger market.

That’s the shift behind Forbes’ inaugural Agentic 20 list. AI agents—systems that can take action on our behalf, not just spit out answers—are moving beyond software triage and calendar management into the messier work of the real economy. Think booking flights, coordinating playdates, and, yes, even helping manage funeral homes.

The list highlights 20 companies and projects making a dent in the agentic AI world, from breakout personal assistant AIs like Instinct—a 14 person, $10 billion company run by a 23-year-old—to the infrastructure companies that help agents browse the web and transact. Alongside the breakout names, we looked for strange and unexpected uses (shrimp farming!) and other corners of real-world work where “AI assistant” means more than just a chatbot’s to-do list.

This is not a formula-driven ranking. There is no scoring methodology for a nascent market that is still sorting itself out. The list draws on on-the-ground reporting, interviews with founders and users and conversations with investors and others across Silicon Valley. We followed the buzz, then looked for signs of actual use. The result is a snapshot of the agentic AI companies worth watching now.

Product: AI personal assistants

Instinct is arguably the hottest AI agent startup in Silicon Valley. Proof: The company behind it reached a $10 billion valuation without even releasing its agent to the public. Still in an invite-only beta, Instinct already handles $1 billion in annual transaction volume, most from travel-related requests, CEO Noah Shinn, 23, says. The agent lives in iMessage and WhatsApp instead of its own dedicated app, making it easy for use for everyday tasks and simple errands like booking flight tickets and tracking orders. It has all the tools it needs to do a good job: its own email address, a private browser and the ability to make calls. The agent became so popular that the startup faced a compute crunch right out of the gate, prompting it to raise $1 billion from VC bigwigs Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue.

Meta’s personal AI agent Muse might just be the comeback the social media giant needs to get ahead in the AI race. It does the standard demo reel chores—book flights, send emails and shop for groceries—but the use case that won tons of early traction was personal finance. Early adopters used Muse to negotiate bills, chase refunds and kill idle subscriptions, in some cases recovering thousands of dollars. Muse quickly went viral after its early September launch, crossing five million downloads in just three weeks and beating rival bots like SpaceXAI’s Grok and Anthropic’s Claude. Aggressive marketing and free usage might be one reason for rapid adoption:. The company allocated up to 50% of its daily house ad inventory to promote the app across Facebook and Instagram. A cute, cuddly, customizable mascot dubbed Jolly might be another. Meta even launched a Tamagotchi-style device called Muse Charm so people can interact with their agent without their phones.

Wajo is making a calculated bet: People don’t care whether an AI agent finished the job, only that the job was done. Its assistant, Fo, can research plumbers, call for quotes, check your calendar and schedule a visit. When it gets stuck, trained human contractors step in—clearing a website verification, finishing a call, or handling the awkward bit the model cannot—without leaving the user staring at a frozen app. Fo only launched weeks ago, but investors told Forbes they were impressed by founder Shivani Poddar, TKAGE, who worked on AI assistant products at Amazon, Meta, and Google and led engineering for Jules, Google’s autonomous coding agent. Fo’s pitch isn’t so much “fully autonomous,” as it is “reliable enough that you don’t have to worry how it happened.” Privacy is another selling point: Poddar says the system is designed to keep private conversations from spilling into group chats and to require permission before personal information is shared. As of early October she said Fo had tens of thousands of users, with its user base doubling every two days after public launch.

Andon Labs wants its AI agents to run entire companies. Currently, they are running an entire store in San Francisco’s Marina district, where they write job postings, interview applicants and manage real human personnel. They are not exactly crushing it. CEO Lukas Petersson says the store is not profitable. But he argues the point is not profitability, it’s proving that agents can actually handle messy, real-world managerial work. Andon Labs’ AI agents are also running a cafe in Sweden and four radio stations, one........

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