Most AI assistants wait for a prompt. Mistlabs is selling the opposite behaviour and has raised $26M to take it out of beta on Apple devices.
Its system, Ambi, learns about a user from conversations picked up on an iPhone, Apple Watch or Mac, then tries to act on that context without being asked. Chief executive Peter Mo says the goal is software that understands, reasons and acts in real time.
Ambi’s state follows the user across devices, so an in-progress task started on a Mac continues on a phone. Users can set up recurring routines and hand them to multiple agents at once.
The company’s own example is a meeting about competitors where agents fact-check claims as the discussion unfolds and draft a proposal on the user’s laptop before anyone leaves the room.
The obvious tension is privacy. Always-listening software that builds a personal model sits directly against Apple’s on-device processing pitch, and users will judge the trade-off for themselves.
Agentic assistants that act without instruction also raise accountability questions regulators have only started to address.
