Couples are using a viral AI agent to do their emotional labor. It’s been helpful — and chaotic.

Some early adopters of Instinct are using AI agents to manage common tasks in a relationship, like shared to-do lists and vacation itineraries. It's had mixed results.

Getty Images; BI

• Instinct's new "Trusted Person" allows users to connect their AI agents and tag-team tasks.
• Some couples use it for shared to-dos or help planning surprise date nights.
• While it cuts down on emotional labor, a therapist says not so fast: You still have to put work in.

AI agents aren't just sneaking into your workplace anymore. Soon, they might be making regular appearances in your relationship.

Since the launch of Instinct, an invite-only AI assistant that went viral among Silicon Valley insiders in August, early adopters have been using it to offload tasks like booking hotels and scheduling appointments.

Then, on September 9, Noah Shinn, the company's 23-year-old founder, announced Instinct's new "Trusted Person" feature: You could now have your Instinct agent directly communicate with another person's Instinct agent to reduce the amount of "back-and-forth" in a relationship, such as coordinating plans and organizing vacations.

Introducing our Trusted Person network powered by our new Instinct-to-Instinct communication protocol. Your Instinct can now talk to other Instincts to coordinate plans on your behalf.

Getting people together often involves a lot of back-and-forth: finding a time, working out… pic.twitter.com/LXkDpXGmea

— Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn) September 9, 2026

So far, some users have found it helpful. "Instinct syncs with my wife's Instinct so we can actually finish a shared to-do list," Alex Borkin, a 36-year-old entrepreneur who uses AI across his portfolio of companies, said on X, noting that it was easier than manually setting up AI agents using Claude Code or Codex.

Have you used Instinct's "Trusted Person" feature with a spouse or partner? If you'd like to share your story, please reach out to jpugachevsky@businessinsider.com.

While Instinct may help eradicate the most annoying part of a partnership (figuring out dinner plans when you both keep saying "whatever you want!"), it can also open up the possibilities of new relationship drama. Some users have already reported some issues, ranging from privacy concerns to accidentally spoiled surprises.

Your emotional labor robot

Emotional labor is disproportionately felt by women in relationships, causing friction. AI agents are marketed as reducing some of those responsibilities.

janiecbros/Getty Images

The greatest appeal of Instinct and other AI agents is their ability to cut down on what Borkin calls "boring tasks" — like booking appointments or getting refunds.

"I close the loop," Borkin told Business Insider. "I get to go to bed and not think of 'Did I take care of jury duty?'"

Like other working parents, Borkin and his wife use Instinct's Trusted Person feature to smooth out their day-to-day life as a family with two kids, ages 3 and 20 months (and a third child on the way).

Most recently, the couple used Instinct agents to send them individual reminders to complete tasks for their daughter's third birthday party, such as ordering food.

"It's nice not having to remind myself of something I asked my wife to help with, and then remind her if she's taking care of it," Borkin said.

The more invisible work within a relationship — such as nudging a spouse to finish a task you asked them to do — requires cognitive and emotional labor. Some partners, more often women, can feel as though they bear the brunt of this work, leading to tension in the relationship.

Annie Wright, a licensed psychotherapist who works with Silicon Valley clientele, told Business Insider that this dynamic is so common in heterosexual relationships that, sometimes, even AI agents don't fully solve the problem.

"Even when you have an AI agent, who's putting in the prompt to begin with, who's architecting out the idea, who's remaining responsible for the oversight of that agent?" Wright said. More often than not, she said it's her female clients who are tasked with the burden.

Wright said it can also be tempting to use AI agents as a way to avoid enduring "weaponized incompetence" when a partner performs the task wrong — or just keeps ignoring you.

"An AI agent isn't going to bring that same relational scar tissue into the dynamic with you," she said. "It's very compelling. It provides a kind of shortcut, but it doesn't eliminate all the work for you."

Deep intimacy required

To book flights or fulfill shopping requests, AI agents need access to your credit card and all relevant login credentials.

showcake/Getty Images

Instinct fans have used it to do everything from booking a birthday cabin to canceling forgotten subscriptions, impressed by its ability to successfully follow through on semi-complex tasks. Users can send Instinct a simple text request to book an in-network doctor's appointment, and it seems to follow through effectively.

There's a catch, though: Instinct needs to know a lot about you to perform well. Depending on what you ask it to do, it might need access to your email account, calendar, or even credit card.

Users have reported troubling incidents, including privacy and security concerns. Some users have also reported hallucinations and what appeared to be leaks of strangers' data.

Out of caution, Borkin said he only linked Instinct to his retailer accounts (like Amazon and Costco) without directly giving it his credit card. He also uses a throwaway email account for Instinct to avoid the risk of any sensitive information being breached.

Naturally, AI agent mishaps can cause new issues in a relationship. Wright said the biggest risk is one person in the relationship now feeling responsible for checking that the AI agent properly followed through on instructions.

"One partner thinks they've handed off a task while the other partner still feels responsible for making sure it happens — now you've got a new argument," she said. "Technology can become another place where you're disagreeing about who's responsible."

When agents remove agency

Wright said AI agents can mirror 1950s secretaries, buying anniversary gifts for wives.

George Marks/Getty Images

Sometimes, Instinct's glitches can be more innocuous — even entertaining. Luba Yudasina, an angel investor, said she asked her Instinct to help her plan a surprise for her boyfriend, according to her post on X. She wanted it to ask him when he was free and what kinds of dates he would like.

Instead, it blabbed too much.

Told my Instinct to reach out to my bf's Instict to plan a surprise.

This is what his Instict texted him 🤪 pic.twitter.com/JqEM2IbzXm

— luba yudasina (@LubaYudasina) September 15, 2026

On a bigger scale, using Instinct raises questions about the merits of smoothing out every crease in a relationship. If that idyllic proposal was entirely dreamed up and coordinated by an AI agent, is it as romantic? If Instinct handles all the household logistics and plans all the date nights because your husband can't be bothered to, do you feel as seen in your marriage?

Wright said AI agents could almost be stand-ins for 1950s secretaries tasked with buying birthday gifts for their bosses' wives. "Getting help expressing your care versus outsourcing the attention that makes the gesture meaningful — that's a really important distinction to draw," she said.

There's a high cost to cutting out any source of conflict in a relationship: the ability to grow together. One satirical X post by Alex Cohen, the cofounder and CEO of the AI agent platform Hello Patient, summed it up best: Who's to stop the AI agents from absorbing each partner's passive-aggressive jabs, the humans behind the screens becoming empty husks occupying a living room together?

My wife and I no longer talk to each other, instead our AI agents communicate on our behalf.

This is the future 😍 pic.twitter.com/b4mUhQpkK1

— Alex Cohen (@anothercohen) September 21, 2026

It illustrates Wright's biggest concern: skirting over real relationship issues for the sake of expediency.

"If we're already arguing about how much time we spend with your family, having software arrange another visit hasn't really settled anything," she said. "It's just made a decision before we reached an agreement and really done the hard relational work to arrive there."

For some couples, there's work that even the top AI agents aren't cut out for. Michael Stothard, a partner at Firstminute Capital in the UK who uses Instinct with his wife, shared on LinkedIn that he wanted to branch out from using it for administrative tasks alone.

"Michael asks his Instinct to pass you a message: 'I love you,'" his agent said.

His wife responded: "Tell him he's an idiot."

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A close read of Mackenzie Scott's baffling post-divorce novel

PA Images/Reuters; NURPHOTO/Reuters; iStock; Tyler Le/BI

When Mackenzie Scott got divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, she became one of the richest people in the world overnight. Their divorce settlement was among the largest in history, granting her assets that included 4% of Amazon's stock — roughly $38 billion. She wasted little time before starting to give her fortune away, handing off large sums to organizations ranging from pandemic relief nonprofits to community colleges within a year of their split. Based on the coinciding of her left-leaning philanthropic efforts and her ex-husband's cozying up to the president, it would make sense if she weren't wild about what Bezos has been up to. But other than occasional blog posts about her charitable giving, Scott is famously tight-lipped. Mostly, she lets her actions speak for themselves.

So it didn't escape notice when Scott announced last month that she would be self-publishing a serialized novel, "Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds)".

A former protégé of Toni Morrison, Scott previously published two novels under the name Mackenzie Bezos: 2005's "The Testing of Luther Albright," a family drama for which she won the American Book Award, and the 2013 thriller "Traps." "Last Days" is a departure from her earlier work. It's set in a dystopian near-future where America has been split into two opposing factions, the "Still United" states and an authoritarian regime called the Dakota Membership. Scott's third-person narration moves between the perspectives of a sprawling cast — 18 different characters, as the subtitle suggests. And while she worked with traditional publishers for her first two novels, Scott released "Last Days" in nine free installments on Substack over the course of August. It was one of the few ways, people online quickly pointed out, that her work would stay off of Amazon.

That doesn't mean Scott was trying to fly under the radar. Given her evident interest in preserving her privacy and ample experience of having her actions interpreted and misinterpreted by a rapacious public, she had to know that people would read her first published fiction in over a decade with eyes as all-seeing as Ring cameras. If she wanted to stay out of the spotlight, why did she announce the upcoming release on her verified X page, not to mention publish it under her real name? The fact that she put out this dispatch from a grim imagined future in such an unvarnished and public way feels like an invitation to speculate about what Scott thinks about her ex-husband, herself, and maybe even the rest of us.

The bulk of "Last Days" takes place over the course of one week in which various characters collide and conspire to free themselves from the shackles of the Dakota Membership. This fascistic society has been plagued by a slew of pandemics and is now a place where children with quirks and emotional lives, people whose parents had any brushes with free thinking or rebellion, and even those with the occasional seditious thought are liable to be shipped off to so-called self-improvement centers, subjected to gruesome gene therapy treatments, and worse. There's no internet or non-propaganda news. Even appliances like stoves and refrigerators have been banned, though party officials offer to supply them when they're looking for favors.

After wading through a morass of unsubtle description, readers are left with more questions than answers about what message Scott stepped up onto her long-empty digital podium to convey.

The man at the helm is President Damian Paxton, an autocrat with a fondness for eugenics, koi fish, lavish residences, and "subtlety in everything but geopolitics and women," with whom he likes to soak in a giant hexagonal bathtub with fake gold faucets shaped like dolphins, among other salacious activities. In short, he's a very 2026 cartoon villain. Scott's touch isn't exactly light; direct and allusive shout-outs to the Third Reich abound. ("Why can't anybody in this country hear a Nazi when they hear one?" one character asks early in the story while griping privately about Paxton's administration.) Reading about the rustic furnishings in one of Paxton's bunkers or an opulent regime party at Mount Rushmore, it's all too easy to picture a sovereign who looks something like a cowboy hat-clad Bezos in his infamous 2023 Vogue photo shoot, a newer, younger, filler-filled wife draped across his lap. The comparison isn't one-to-one, but Scott is clearly trafficking in the visual language of the second Trump administration.

In many ways, though, it is Liv Lockhart, the event planner behind these garish soirées, who is Scott's central character. On the surface, Lockhart is a true disciple, ready and waiting to do Paxton's bidding, made up exactly the way he likes (Paxton calls her a "smokeshow," and one of her female underlings describes her features as being "stuffed into a costume of sexuality like parts in a sausage casing"). Within the relative safety of her secluded home, she is someone else entirely: making fun of her supreme leader to curry favor with her disenchanted young son, Will, whom she keeps locked inside out of concern for his safety while she crafts an escape plan that will get the two of them to freedom. Lockhart harbors few illusions about the rules governing the world they live in; her goals are hardly humanitarian. "There are no good choices," she opines at one point. "This is not a fantasy buffet. It's a smorgasbord of shit sandwiches. Just pick one, take bite after big smelly bite, digest, and belly up again. Thought turds, choice turds, every country had its turds, pooped out on a banquet table by lonely baby-men." She is both complicit and a rebel, an author of Paxton's propaganda and a shameless non-believer. She justifies all of her misguided and perplexing actions as a manifestation of her unyielding maternal love.

Scott's descriptions are similarly heavy-handed throughout, especially in the book's denouement. Many of the characters we've come to know — a "therapeutic modification" patient; the party doctor who had been experimenting on him; a cook in one of Paxton's residences; even Deepak, a character we hear from only once — meet sudden and untimely ends. Finally, after a string of chaotic turns that find Paxton locked away (by choice!) in an underground bunker and starting every day with a cup of coffee brewed with beans from St. Helena, the remote island where Napoleon Bonaparte lived his last days in exile, Scott zooms ahead into the future. There, we learn from an adult Will that the Dakotas were eventually reabsorbed into the Still United states, where he is now working on a dissertation about "the intergenerational impact of narcissistic control on nation states and family systems." Still, making sense of all that has happened is a tall order. "We are comforted by the idea of the one narrative, fixed, linear, but all of the different versions are happening at once, and they change again when we think of them again at different times, or at different angles. The only common denominator is us," Will muses. "Maybe all the things we do to each other, and to ourselves, including violence, function to bring us into relationship with each other."

Thought turds, choice turds, every country had its turds, pooped out on a banquet table by lonely baby-men.A musing from Liv Lockhart, one of Scott's narrators

It's a baffling conclusion fit for a baffling project. Is Scott trying to make a point about narcissistic baby-man leaders, the moral compromises we all make, the value of interpersonal relationships in the face of authoritarianism, the fallacy of a fixed and linear narrative, or something else entirely? As Vanity Fair noted, Scott might have considered spreading her wealth a little further by hiring a freelance editor. The New York Post said the quiet part out loud, calling the project "hard-to-untangle." Whether the story's convolution was intentional or not, it doesn't make for very satisfying reading. After wading through a morass of unsubtle description, readers are left with more questions than answers about what message Scott stepped up onto her long-empty digital podium to convey.

Scott's chosen format doesn't help her cause. Readers have the option of accessing the text directly on Substack or downloading PDFs fashioned to look like a manuscript in progress, double-spaced and set in Courier. The latter presentation in particular lends the story an unfinished feel. Add to this the meandering plot and smattering of typos, and "Last Days" starts to seem almost dashed-off. It's so striking that one almost wonders whether this was actually intentional. After all, the choice to publish on Substack has aesthetic effects beyond the implicit anti-Amazon messaging. Perhaps Scott is trying to position her voice as one in a sea of many, not unlike her many characters' distinct and occasionally incoherent points of view.

The catch, of course, is that Scott isn't just like the rest of us. She's a household name, and her net worth is more than the entire US publishing industry's annual revenue. Unlike so many other self-published writers, her work won't be consigned to gather dust in the far reaches of Substack. Some 11,000 people subscribed to "Last Days in Two Nations," no doubt intrigued, as I was, by what Jeff Bezos' mysterious and brilliant ex-wife, a public figure famously adept at understatement, had to say. But as any disgruntled media worker could tell you, it is one challenge to get readers where you want them and another challenge entirely to keep them there.

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When his wife got sick, this doctor turned to an AI chatbot to navigate her rare cancer diagnosis. Then he invested.

Dr. Munjal Shroff said he's used AI to help support his wife through her cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Munjal Shroff

• When Dr. Munjal Shroff's wife got sick with a mysterious illness, he turned to an AI healthcare app.
• Shroff said Healz AI helped him advocate for his wife and navigate her treatment.
• The early stage startup is backed by Alexey Dosovitskiy, cofounder of Recursive Superintelligence.

Dr. Munjal Shroff's wife started experiencing unexplained symptoms in the fall of 2025: rashes, itching, fatigue, and swollen lymph nodes. After consulting with multiple doctors and extensive testing, they struggled to get a diagnosis.

Shroff, a psychiatrist based in Atlanta, said he needed something to help keep track of everything and searched for a healthcare-specific AI tool. He found Healz AI, a healthcare AI assistant, and signed up.

The app turned out to be a crucial resource. It encouraged them to seek another opinion that ultimately led to her diagnosis: rare T-cell lymphoma. After relying on the app throughout her treatment, Shroff believed in it so much that he became an investor.

"I think without it, the diagnosis and treatment would've been delayed," he said.

The app, which launched in beta last year, is a chatbot designed to help cancer patients navigate their diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. The early-stage startup is backed by Recursive Superintelligence cofounder Alexey Dosovitskiy, the company exclusively told Business Insider.

Dosovitskiy is a former Google researcher who authored a breakthrough paper on computer vision in 2020. Recursive, a self-improving AI startup founded by a group of researchers around the start of the year, has raised over $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation.

Dosovitskiy said he invested in Healz because healthcare is an area where AI can make a big difference by improving and saving lives.

"Now is the time to work on this: the underlying technology is largely there, and it needs to be made into products that help people," he told Business Insider in an email.

The AI pushed him to seek another opinion

Shroff said he'd used general AI tools but that he wanted something specific to healthcare. When he started using Healz, his wife's doctors suspected an autoimmune condition, such as lupus, was the more likely diagnosis, but that cancer was a possibility. Healz agreed and did not immediately conclude she had cancer.

Instead, it recommended she get an opinion from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. That decision is what finally got her a diagnosis. Healz also pointed Shroff toward a specific specialist at MD Anderson for her treatment.

Shroff said his wife's local doctors were helpful and that he thinks they would've eventually gotten another opinion that led to the right diagnosis, even without the AI. But he said Healz encouraged them to advocate for it sooner and helped avoid additional delays and uncertainty.

"I think that pivot of getting the second opinion from MD Anderson was just absolutely crucial," he said. "I think it ultimately could have potentially happened, but it would've taken much longer."

Igor Demishev and Alex Plat, founders and co-CEOs of Healz AI, said they saw a need for a more specialized healthcare AI focused on cancer.

Healz AI

Igor Demishev and Alex Plat, founders and co-CEOs of Healz, said their app is meant to supplement, not replace, human doctors. They said Healz can help patients understand their diagnosis, find oncologists, interpret scans and tests, and navigate treatment and recovery.

Demishev and Plat said they focused on cancer because it affects so many people and often involves complex cases. They were also motivated by personal reasons — several people in Demishev's family have had cancer. "We are working with people who have insanely hard stories," Plat said, adding they saw a need for a more specialized AI tool.

Healz does not have its own foundation model but instead uses existing models layered with its own memory system, workflows, and other technologies. The founders said the memory system of their AI is designed to digest and store large volumes of documents and medical files, adding that one user has uploaded 1,500 documents.

Healz is also designed to avoid common pitfalls of AI chatbots, such as being overly agreeable. Its "root-cause mode" prompts the model to ask up to 20 follow-up questions about the user's symptoms before drawing any conclusions or making suggestions.

He still uses Healz and invested in the company

The founders said that after the initial limited launch, recurring revenue doubled each month from June to August, bringing its annual recurring revenue — the amount a company expects to collect over a year from subscriptions — to $100,000 as of early September.

The current Healz user base is 97% patients with cancer. Some of the remaining users are doctors who use it as a reference tool, the founders said. They also said most users engage with the app daily or weekly and that their month-to-month user retention was 70%.

After the diagnosis, Shroff and his wife continued using Healz. He said he consulted with the AI to weigh different chemotherapy options, and it suggested one that he should ask her doctor about. The doctor agreed it was the right course of action. Shroff said the doctor may have recommended it regardless, but that because of Healz, he felt more prepared going into the appointment and more reassured in the decision.

"I think it builds comfort," Shroff said of instances when the doctor's and AI's recommendations aligned.

After months of being a heavy user of the platform, Shroff decided to become an investor as well. Demishev and Plat said Healz is planning additional fundraising in the coming months.

Shroff said there are limitations with the AI and that it has occasionally been off on some specifics regarding her treatment and monitoring. That's why, he said, it's crucial to use it in conjunction with human doctors who can actually see firsthand what's going on.

Shroff's wife is still in treatment, and he continues to rely on Healz. He thinks that for patients or their loved ones who don't have medical training, the AI would be even more valuable.

"It's so easy to get lost in being a patient," he said, adding, "It's been an indispensable tool."

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She left her NYC teaching job to open a sewing studio. Here's how she did it.

Kate Saffady, 50, runs Brooklyn Stitch Studio full-time as of June 2026. Her revenue year-to-date is around $190,000.

George Etheredge for BI

• Kate Saffady left teaching to manage her Brooklyn sewing studio full-time.
• Brooklyn Stitch Studio offers sewing classes for kids and adults.
• Saffady had to navigate NYC's business costs, balancing expenses and income to make it work.

Tucked in a brick building in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, is a studio with four white walls with highlights of blue and purple furniture, where children go to sew.

At the Brooklyn Stitch Studio, kids ages eight and up dedicate 90 minutes after school to working on self-directed projects — coming out with sweatshirts and zip pouches.

The more sew-savvy kids help out those still trying to get over the learning curve — in the meantime, they form tight-knit groups, and although the shop's owner, Kate Saffady, encourages it, it seems to happen organically as they share the space, she said.

This spring, Saffady saw that the studio was bringing in more revenue than her preschool teaching job, and in June, the 50-year-old left the classroom to run the studio full time.

Brooklyn Stitch Studio is located inside Gowanus Creative Studios, a Brooklyn workspace complex.

George Etheredge for BI

In 2025, she earned almost $110,000 with her studio while working as a teacher. Year to date, Saffady has earned around $190,000 in revenue and expects additional income in November, when she begins booking the winter session.

In addition to the after-school courses, Saffady also offers private sewing events, birthdays, and one-off adult workshops. She has done everything herself, from building her website to the business's accounting.

"This business is kind of hyperlocal, very specific to this area, so that's why I wanted Brooklyn in it," she said in reference to the studio's name.

Saffady said she usually spends more on fabric for adult classes, since they have a wider range of aesthetics and tastes, while kids are usually easier to buy fabrics for.

George Etheredge for BI

Saffady is one of the business owners Business Insider has interviewed for our Cost of the City series, where we report on what it takes to make it work in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the country.

The Albany-born small-business owner moved to NYC in 1994. She has lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, for 25 years.

Her mom was a quilter, and as an adult, Saffady practiced sewing on and off. Yet, it was only in 2019 that she picked it up again. This led her to open a four-week crafts summer camp in a rented classroom during the summer of 2022. Seeing how kids really took to the sewing section, the camp focused solely on sewing the next year. By January 2025, she opened a physical studio and started hosting classes there.

The cost of growing a small business in NYC

To furnish the space, she bought chairs and tables from Ikea and Walmart and spent thousands on sewing machines and materials, putting the expenses on a credit card that she is still paying off. By spring of 2025, she was breaking even on the studio space.

Since sewing became her job, Saffady has had to find other pastimes, such as beading and embroidery. "Turning my hobby into a business has completely eliminated my personal hobby of it," she said.

George Etheredge for BI

In April 2026, she moved to a larger room in the same building, where rent, maintenance, and utilities total $2,587 a month. The additional space allowed her to host larger events and build more momentum.

"My rent increased a lot, but I'm also able to do so many more things that I couldn't do in my old space," she said.

After-school classes cost $60 to $80, while workshops run $90 to $110. With 12 machines, she typically caps most classes at 12 students, though there are some exceptions for bigger events. Five or six attendees typically cover a class's costs, though she will run smaller classes of four students to build word-of-mouth demand.

She also pays around $55 in monthly liability insurance and over $200 in materials a month. Fabric is the biggest burden, since wholesalers require large upfront bulk orders. For Saffady, that meant spending around $3,500 on initial orders with two different fabric suppliers.

"You have to bite that bullet and make that first large order," she said.

Saffady pays over $2,400 a month out of pocket for health insurance for herself, her husband, and her three children. She also has to pay New York City's unincorporated business tax, a 4% tax on qualifying business income. Yet, fluctuating revenue makes it difficult to estimate in advance how much she will have to pay in taxes, meaning she has to build a savings cushion for those taxes.

"That's just the cost of doing business in New York," she said.

Saffady has made some sacrifices to offset these expenses. She has yet to install internet and has given up street visibility for a studio in a larger complex — she said the lower rent, the building's services, and nearby businesses make the trade-off worthwhile.

"Ideally, I would have wanted to be in a retail storefront, in a more visible foot traffic area," she said.

Leaving the classroom

Her experience as a preschool teacher has also helped her transition into her new role.

"My pace is naturally slow, and I'm used to breaking it down. It comes easily to me to soothe someone when they're frustrated or upset," she said. "It's very similar to the scenarios that happen in preschool."

Saffady in her studio, sitting in front of tote bags, purses, wallets, and pouches she and her son have sewn.

George Etheredge for BI

To prepare for the switch, she saved all the money that came in from the studio and, with her husband, decided to be more financially conservative as the business grows. Although she gave up a stable income, she has gained a more balanced life.

"The more events I booked, the more momentum started to build, and I felt like I couldn't turn things away," she said.

For a 90-minute sewing class, it's at least 2 hours of prep time. Now, Saffady spends most of her day preparing for prep work for the kids — something she used to have to do at night after her teaching job.

"I'm just on the cusp of realizing how much more balanced my life can be," she said.

Living in NYC is costly, but it is key to how Saffady runs her client-based business.

"There's such a large pool of potential customers in New York. As difficult as it is with the costs here. It must be so much more difficult to do something like this in a smaller area."

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Flying in Beta Technologies' Alia CX300 showed me why electric planes aren't mainstream yet

tk

• Beta's electric plane can already fly for hours. So why aren't paying passengers riding in one yet?
• The biggest roadblock is hiding under the floor: nearly 3,000 pounds of batteries.
• Beta is racing toward a 2027 certification target, but getting airborne may be the easy part.

US airline fares rose almost 24% over the past year, making the prospect of cheaper short flights especially appealing.

One possible solution: electric planes.

For our video series, "The Limit," I recently took a 25-minute flight on Beta Technologies' Alia CX300. The journey used about $5.25 in electricity. A comparable trip in a conventional jet-fuel-powered plane would have cost an estimated 10 times as much in fuel, about $60

Electric aviation has spent decades promising an electric-car-style revolution. Beyond lower costs, electric planes could make short flights quieter and produce no in-flight emissions.

Now, one Vermont-based company is facing a crucial test.

Beta Technologies is aiming to get its Alia CX300 certified by the Federal Aviation Administration by the end of 2027. The plane has already flown nearly 400 miles on a charge and stayed airborne for over five hours.

The question is whether those advantages can translate into a viable business. Other electric-aircraft startups have run into financial trouble after spending years trying to bring aircraft to market.

I toured Beta's manufacturing facility, watched how it builds its batteries and aircraft, and flew aboard the CX300 myself.

What I saw helps explain why electric planes still aren't regularly carrying passengers, more than 50 years after the first electric aircraft flew — and what Beta has to accomplish over the next year if it wants to change that.

Beta thinks controlling almost everything could give it an edge.

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Other electric-aircraft companies have already gone under after spending years and billions of dollars trying to bring their planes to market.

Beta is taking a vertically integrated approach, building its own batteries, propulsion systems, planes, and charging technology.

The company went public in November 2025, raising more than $1 billion. “It was the largest founder-led industrial IPO in history,” Beta founder and CEO Kyle Clark told me.

The physics are still working against electric planes.

Each of Beta's battery packs weighs about 560 pounds.

Busienss Insider

In order to fly about 300 nautical miles, the Alia CX300 must carry nearly 3,000 pounds of batteries. The jet fuel needed to fly a comparable distance would weigh only about 50 pounds.

The CX300 can carry just five passengers and one pilot, underscoring how battery weight constrains the size and range of electric aircraft.

That's why Beta is initially targeting relatively short routes of about 150 to 200 miles.

So Beta designed an airplane around using as little energy as possible.

Business Insider

The CX300's 50-foot tapered wingspan, V-shaped tail, and rear-mounted propeller reduce drag and conserve battery power. Its wing shape was inspired by the Arctic tern, a bird known for its long migrations.

During my flight, the pilot shut off the motor, and the aircraft continued gliding without power. With a roughly 17-to-1 lift-to-drag ratio, Beta says the CX300 could glide down to a suitable landing strip after a complete loss of power.

The CX300 is fast and surprisingly maneuverable.

Business Insider

While I was inside the aircraft, the sheer acceleration took me by surprise.

The CX300 reached roughly 87 knots, about 100 mph, before lifting off, and once we were airborne, the pilot put the plane through a series of sharp rolls and banks.

The flight was smooth overall, though the sharp banking was enough to make me a little queasy. I don't blame the electric propulsion: I think that would have happened to me in any small plane.

Then there's the infrastructure problem.

Inside Beta Technologies headquarters.

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A gas-powered aircraft can land and refuel at airports around the world, while an electric plane needs charging infrastructure to get back into the air.

Beta has installed more than 120 charging stations across the US, and its system can recharge an aircraft in under an hour.

The company is also building the charging technology itself, meaning it can develop the planes, batteries, propulsion systems, and infrastructure as parts of the same ecosystem.

Beta is spending hundreds of millions before its plane reaches commercial service.

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Getting the technology to work is expensive. Beta says it generated a little more than $35 million in revenue last year against about $400 million in operating expenses.

The company is also building a business around replacement batteries, which it expects customers to need repeatedly over an aircraft's lifetime.

2027 could be the real test.

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Beta is targeting FAA-conforming production of the Alia CX300, its conventional-takeoff aircraft, at the end of 2026 or early 2027, with certification expected by the end of 2027.

The company plans to start with medical, cargo, and defense missions before moving into passenger service, while continuing to develop a vertical-takeoff version that wouldn't need a conventional runway.

Certification still won't guarantee cheap electric flights.

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Electricity itself can be cheap: The CX300 demonstration flight I was on cost only a few dollars in electricity, according to Beta.

Commercial operators would still have to pay for pilots, maintenance, insurance, charging infrastructure, and battery replacements.

Beta has already shown that an electric plane can fly hundreds of miles. By the end of 2027, it hopes to prove something much harder: that one can make it through certification and become a commercial aircraft.

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NYC's DoorDash settlement is just one part of Mamdani's big swing against delivery apps

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images

• The last two NYC mayors have gone after major delivery companies.
• Mamdani's win against DoorDash this week is part of a bigger campaign over gig worker pay and safety.
• Business leaders fear Mamdani's policies could reduce job investments and impact local employment.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's win against DoorDash is just one battle in his bigger war on delivery companies.

The $131.5 million settlement accomplished what former mayor Eric Adams' administration had begun. Now, regulating companies like Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber Eats has become a pillar of Mamdani's approach to the business world: His administration confronts blue-chip employers with lawsuits and tighter policies, and supports union efforts to boost worker safety and financial security.

Business Insider spoke with City Hall leaders, union representatives, and companies at the center of Mamdani's delivery work crackdown. Worker advocates are pushing for even tighter protections, while employers worry about what it means for their businesses and operations in the city.

DoorDash said in its Tuesday statement, "We screwed up," but other companies say increased regulation could make it harder for delivery businesses to operate in NYC.

DoorDash isn't the first delivery app to get dinged in NYC

Regulating the delivery economy is thorny, especially when thousands of New Yorkers' incomes are on the line. Business leaders, big and small, say that with more hoops to jump through, they will be less likely to invest in jobs in NYC.

The administration has received this criticism before, with business leaders concerned that Mamdani's policies — ranging from city-run grocery stores to taxes — could undermine job stability for small vendors and local workers.

The Mamdani administration's main focus has been on eliminating delivery app junk fees and enforcing scheduling laws and gig worker protections enacted before the mayor took office.

The city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection led the effort to secure the DoorDash settlement after a court found that 264,000 Dashers were underpaid or paid late.

The DCWP previously settled multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Uber Eats and Hungry Panda over what courts found to be labor violations, like unnecessary charges and unfair wages. Commissioner Sam Levine called the Tuesday settlement "a real game changer for our enforcement and our policy development."

Few cities have the kind of gig worker protections that NYC is pushing for, and any wins from the Mamdani camp could set the tone for worker protections in other metros. "My message to other cities is copy us, do better than us," Levine told Business Insider.

Beyond legislation, Mamdani's team sponsored a new Deliverista Hub in lower Manhattan with charging stations and resources for workers at app-based delivery companies.

Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers' Justice Project — a union representing delivery workers, cleaners, and construction workers — told Business Insider over the summer that her organization has seen the mayor, "delivering settlements, making concrete changes in the industry, forcing app delivery companies into compliance, and ensuring they treat workers more fairly and with dignity."

Up Next: Amazon

In August, Mamdani announced his support for the Delivery Worker Protection Act, a City Council bill that would increase licensing requirements for companies operating delivery-focused warehouse facilities, opening the door to expanded safety, training, and resources for workers. It would also make it more difficult for online sellers like Amazon to hire subcontractors without the same benefits and safety protections as full-time employees.

Amazon delivery workers don't operate under the same schedule and pay structure as traditional gig workers — they are direct W-2 employees of the companies that contract with Amazon to drop off packages rather than operating independently — but City Hall is taking steps to improve their working conditions, too.

The retail goliath contracts with last-mile warehouses in New York, where subcontractors handle the final step of the delivery process. Eighteen of those facilities opened in the five boroughs between 2017 and 2025, per the Comptroller's Office.

Despite being a full-time delivery contractor, NYC delivery driver and union leader Luc Rene said that his shifts and weekly income are unpredictable, and he often has to buy his own work equipment.

"It's always a fight to get a job," he said, adding that he and his colleagues aren't always guaranteed 40-hour weeks.

A spokesperson for Amazon referred reporters to the company's testimony sent to City Hall over the latest delivery worker protection proposal, which says the law would threaten "the small businesses that deliver to customers, putting the jobs of more than 5,000 of their employees at risk, and forcing us to consider relocating delivery operations outside of the city."

The New York Delivers Coalition, a group of 50 small businesses, also sent a letter to lawmakers in August, asking them to "consider the real world ramifications this legislation will have on the small, family-owned business community."

As the mayor's worker protection czar, Levine said his next policy goals include cracking down on dynamic pricing and algorithm-created wages for New Yorkers, which Business Insider found already impacts the delivery economy.

"We're in a complex economy — there's going to be complexity — it's who gets to make the rules," Levine said. "Do we leave that entirely to corporate America, or do we say that the people of the city of New York should have some say in how much workers are getting paid, what relief they're entitled to when they're underpaid?"

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Trump wants potash from Belarus. A Canadian premier warns it would have to go through Russia.

Canada supplies the vast majority of US potash imports, a key fertilizer ingredient.

Heywood Yu/Bloomberg/Getty Images

• President Donald Trump is seeking cheaper potash from Belarus as his trade fight with Canada continues.
• A Canadian premier warns that the fertilizer would have to be shipped through Russia.
• Belarus says it has little additional supply because this year's output is already contracted.

President Donald Trump's plan to buy potash from Belarus has drawn a warning from the leader of Canada's biggest potash-producing province, who says the fertilizer would have to be shipped through Russia.

His comments came after Trump said Monday that the US is negotiating a "massive Deal" to buy potash from Belarus.

"The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers.," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Potash is a key fertilizer ingredient used to boost crop yields, and Canada supplies the vast majority of US imports.

The proposal is the latest front in Trump's trade fight with Canada.

His administration has repeatedly targeted Canadian exports, although potash has largely been exempted from tariffs given its importance to US agriculture.

Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, argued that Belarusian potash would have to travel through Russia before reaching US farmers, raising questions about Trump's claim that it would be cheaper.

"Does anyone believe Belarusian blood potash shipped through Russia is going to be more affordable, more sustainable or more ethical than potash shipped from Saskatchewan - right here in North America?" Moe wrote in a post on X.

Belarus is landlocked, and sanctions imposed over its support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, along with the loss of its main export route through Lithuania, have made its potash more expensive to ship to the US through Russia.

Moe has previously warned against using potash as a trade weapon.

As Canada weighed retaliatory trade measures last month, he urged Ottawa not to target potash exports, arguing that the move would hurt Canadian producers and encourage US buyers to look elsewhere.

Whether Belarus can significantly increase shipments to the US is also unclear.

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said earlier this month that Belarus had resumed selling potash to the US after Washington lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash producers.

He also called on Washington to release more than $40 million in Belarusian funds frozen in the US banking system.

On Monday, Lukashenko suggested Belarus may have little additional potash available for new Western buyers.

"We simply do not have those volumes - everything is contracted," he said, according to a post from his office.

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