Key Takeaways

  • Pushing e-commerce links inside personal chat interfaces risks turning trusted AI companions into spam bots that users ignore.
  • High take rates require driving net-new consumer demand rather than capturing referral fees on purchases users already planned to make.
  • John Coogan compares AI shopping pushes to the Gmail Promotions tab apocalypse, where commercial filtering destroyed newsletter open rates.
  • Instinct hired Ben from Coatue, who spent nearly a decade leading content and partnerships at Snapchat, as Chief Business Officer to solve monetization.

The Trust Trap in Conversational Interfaces

When an AI assistant lives in your SMS inbox, it feels like a personal friend. You ask it for life advice, task management, and research. But the moment that assistant pivots into selling you a pair of running shoes, that relationship shatters.

Jordi Hays pointed out the built-in friction of trying to monetize personal assistants with ads: “Well, it's funny because this was always a historical concern with AI ads is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, come on, let's like I think we should buy this, you know, let's buy this. What do you think? Should we buy this?”

Once an AI agent starts nudging purchases, users reclassify the tool. John Coogan warned that this reclassification destroys user engagement overnight. “And if it starts flagging instinct or your AI agent not as a friend but as a promotions vehicle, it goes in that bucket and then the open rate goes way down,” Coogan said. “And this is what happened with like the newsletter apocalypse and Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section.”

If you teach a user that your assistant has an ulterior commercial motive, they stop treating it like a confidant. They treat it like a telemarketer.

Net-New Demand or Race to the Bottom

Beyond user sentiment, the math behind affiliate shopping links in chat interfaces rarely works out. E-commerce brands gladly pay search engines and social platforms because those platforms generate intent or surface new buyers. Squeezing an affiliate link into an existing conversation does not generate new demand.

As Hays explained: “Now, something I've always said or at least said a lot in the last month or so is that if you want to get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand, right? And brands are not going to be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere.”

If an AI assistant only helps a user finish a transaction they already intended to complete, brands will treat it as low-margin affiliate traffic. To build a durable business model, Instinct needs commercial partnerships that create real purchasing intent without alienating their core user base. That explains their recent executive hiring move.

“And they just hired our friend Ben from COTU who was at Snapchat for almost a decade leading like content and partnerships there,” Hays noted. “Yeah, he joined as a chief business officer at Instinct and I think that that is going to be a massive unlock for them.”

What to Do With This

Audit your product interactions this week. If you monetize through recommendations, separate your transactional workflows from your core advisory experience. Never slip sponsored suggestions into trusted, conversational threads unless the user explicitly asked you to find a product to buy.