24 assistants, zero memory: what the AI assistant market map is missing

Published: 8 September 2026 · Reading time: ~9 min · Category: Industry

A map went around on X. Twenty-four AI personal and professional assistant products on two axes: for work at the top, for personal at the bottom; for non-engineers on the left, for engineers on the right.

Vasco Pedro, founder and CEO of Spinnable AI, reshared it on LinkedIn with two questions. Which product is placed wrong? And what belongs on this map that got missed?

I have an answer to both. The second is why I'm writing this.

The shape first. Ten products top-right, engineers and work. Seven top-left, non-engineers and work. Five bottom-left, non-engineers and personal. One bottom-right, engineers and personal. Grok Bot sits on the vertical axis, refusing to pick a side.

Those counts are exact, read off the image. Look at the two halves for a second before reading on. The engineering side of the work axis is a pile-up. The engineering side of the personal axis is a single product sitting on its own.

(a) The one that's placed wrong: Tomo

Tomo sits in the bottom-left with Orchid, Pally, Instinct and Ollie. That group shares one job: you text it, it does something in the world. Books the table. Orders the groceries. Drafts the reply. Tomo is texted the same way and looks identical from outside.

It isn't the same product. Tomo is a self-improvement and accountability coach. Goal tracking, proactive check-ins, calorie logging from food photos, budgeting from a screenshot of your bank statement, screen-time accountability. What it optimises is your behaviour, not your to-do list. That's a category difference, not a placement nudge. Moving it one square doesn't fix it.

Pi isn't a task-executing agent either, but everyone can see that about Pi. Tomo is the one that gets misread, because it's surrounded by products it resembles and isn't.

(b) What's missing: the thing that remembers

Every one of the 24 products is an assistant that does something. Executes, books, drafts, ships, codes, triages. Not one is the thing that remembers.

That absence is the real reason the non-engineer/work quadrant looks so undefined. Look at who's in it: several products converging on the same pitch, an agent for people who don't write code, with no clear line between them. The usual read is that the category is young. I don't think that's it. They all restart from zero every session, so none accumulates the one asset that would separate it from the next one.

You cannot own a category built on amnesia. If the product forgets, every session is a first session, and switching costs nothing.

So the missing layer is memory. Not memory as a feature inside one assistant, locked to that vendor and dead the moment you switch. Memory as its own layer underneath all of them, a second brain for the knowledge already scattered across your apps, so the assistant you use tomorrow starts with the context you built today.

That's Timeln. On my redraw it goes left of centre, mid-height, between Town and Manus. Not a twenty-fifth assistant. The layer the other twenty-four are missing.

Now the map itself.

Top-right: engineers, work (10)

Claude Code (Anthropic) — agentic coding in the terminal, plus IDE extensions and a web surface. Reads and edits your codebase, runs commands, completes multi-step engineering work. In every paid Claude plan. claude.com/product/claude-code

Codex (OpenAI) — the software-engineering agent, as CLI, IDE extension, web app and iOS app, with cloud background agents you can delegate to. Moved from message-based to token-based credit pricing in 2026.

opencode — open-source terminal coding agent, MIT licensed, connecting to a long list of model providers including local ones. Built by the SST team, reportedly now operating as Anomaly. Watch the name: several unrelated repos share it, including an earlier, different opencode-ai/opencode. The map's one is opencode.ai.

Mistral Vibe (Mistral AI) — chat assistant plus terminal-native coding agent, connecting to MCP servers and running parallel and remote agents. Vibe 2.0 went generally available at the end of January 2026. Mistral's product page calls it "formerly Le Chat," so this is a rebrand, not a new product, though sources disagree on whether it replaces Le Chat or is bundled with it. mistral.ai/products/vibe

Berd (Block, Inc.) — Jack Dorsey's company open-sourced this in August 2026. A local-first desktop workspace giving multiple agents a home: roles, skills, tools, projects, session history, visual identities. Built on Goose, Apache 2.0, free. The site doesn't mention Block anywhere. berd.xyz

Hermes (Nous Research) — released February 2026. Open-source self-improving personal agent with three-layer memory: skill memory, conversational memory, and a user model that persists across sessions. Runs as a gateway into Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal and email. The closest thing on this map to what I'm arguing for, and engineer-facing by installation. Several sites pose as the Hermes home and none are confirmed as Nous properties, so use the repo. github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

Claude Tag (Anthropic) — Claude living in Slack. @-mention it in a thread and it carries persistent org context across channels; an ambient mode lets it join unprompted. Announced June 2026, beta for Team and Enterprise. Arguably belongs a column left: the pitch is a general teammate, not a coding tool. claude.com/product/tag

Vellum — the confusing one. Founded 2023 in New York as an enterprise LLM development platform. Today the homepage leads with a personal AI assistant: layered persistent memory, its own email address, 35+ open-source plugins. Third-party databases still describe it purely as the dev platform. Both descriptions are live in public sources; I won't assert which is current. vellum.ai

Energy — a desktop agent from Gabriel Petersson, ex-OpenAI on the Sora team. Launched August 2026. Drives a real browser already signed in with your profiles, plus local files and connected tools. Explicitly positioned for work "beyond software development," so its right-hand placement is debatable. getenergy.com

Perplexity Computer (Perplexity AI) — despite the name, not hardware. A cloud multi-agent digital worker that operates normal software interfaces and keeps going after you close the tab. Launched February 2026, extended to Pro in March. Four variants: cloud, Personal, Enterprise, and a fully local Portable. perplexity.ai/products/computer

On the vertical axis

Grok Bot (xAI) — always-on cloud agents, each with its own persistent cloud computer, that sign into your tools and run long jobs while you're away. Beta launched August 2026. Bundled with SuperGrok tiers and Cursor plans; reporting ties this to a SpaceX acquisition of Cursor, which I'd treat as not independently confirmed. Sitting on the axis is honest. It's genuinely both. x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot

Top-left: non-engineers, work (7)

ChatGPT Work (OpenAI) — launched July 2026. Pulls context from connected apps and files and produces finished artefacts: documents, spreadsheets, decks, reports, websites. Bundled into paid ChatGPT tiers.

Claude Cowork (Anthropic) — launched January 2026 on macOS, expanded to mobile and web in July. Built on Claude Code's foundations but aimed at non-coding work: point it at a folder and describe the job. Anthropic's usage data reportedly shows most Cowork users aren't coding.

Spinnable — pre-built role-based "AI employees" (executive assistant, SDR, financial analyst, support) that run inside your existing tools and talk to you over Slack, WhatsApp and email. From $50/mo. Reported around November 2025 as launched by Unbabel's former CEO; the site names Accel as an investor. spinnable.ai

Lindy — no-code agent builder. Describe a workflow, get an agent that triages email, schedules meetings, updates the CRM, makes calls. Restructured into Plus/Pro/Max in 2026, dropping the free plan.

Town — every user gets a "Townie" with its own @town.com email address that triages the inbox and runs scheduled routines. $55M Series A in June 2026 led by a16z. Town launched in March 2025 as a small-business tax platform and pivoted that engine into a general assistant.

Manus (Butterfly Effect Technology) — the general autonomous agent that went viral in March 2025. Plans and executes multi-step jobs in the cloud and hands back deliverables. Credit-based from $20/mo. Ownership is genuinely murky: Meta announced an acquisition in December 2025, Chinese regulators ordered it unwound in April 2026, and I found no confirmation of where that landed.

Pi (Inflection AI) — an empathetic conversational AI, free at pi.ai. No task execution. Microsoft hired Inflection's leadership in March 2024 and the company pivoted to enterprise. Pi is still up, but calling it a work assistant is generous.

Bottom-left: non-engineers, personal (5)

Orchid (YC X25) — an executive assistant that lives entirely in iMessage. No app, no dashboard. Texts you your day, drafts replies, books things, waits for approval. Went viral in July 2026 on a launch ad that drew real backlash. No published pricing. orchid.ai

Pally — text-based assistant on iMessage and RCS that connects your apps, surfaces context proactively and runs trips, inboxes and follow-ups end to end. Free tier, Pro $25/mo, Max $100/mo. Started as an AI relationship manager and repositioned. pally.com

Instinct (Spear Street Technology) — the summer 2026 story. Text or call it; it runs on a persistent cloud computer with access to your email, calendar, screen and location, and books, orders and negotiates for you. $250M Series B at a $2.5B valuation in August 2026, roughly $350M raised. Still invite-only, free during beta. TechCrunch also ran a piece on its permission scope worth reading next to the funding news. instinct.co

Ollie (Confabulation Corporation) — privacy-first family assistant over text. Watches your calendar, scans Gmail for school emails, plans meals, orders groceries, pays bills, briefs you daily, joins the family group chat. Everyday $25/mo, Always-On $100/mo. Reported as among the first family assistants with SOC 2 attestation. ollie.ai

Tomo (MAPO LABS) — the misplaced one, above. Out of stealth June 2026 with a $5M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures. $19.99/mo. tomo.ai

Bottom-right: engineers, personal (1)

OpenInstinct (Merit Systems) — self-hostable open-source iMessage assistant with an encrypted credential vault. Drives a real cloud browser through sign-in and checkout, then texts back a screenshot. Secrets pass by handle, so the model never sees your card number. MIT licensed; you pay the infrastructure. Its author positions it as "Instinct but self-hostable" and there's no ownership or funding relationship between the two. An unrelated samagra14/openinstinct on GitHub is not this. openinstinct.sh

The point

One product in a whole quadrant. Less a market gap than a signal about who currently thinks personal AI is worth self-hosting.

The bigger signal runs across all four. Twenty-four products, all good at doing, and doing keeps getting cheaper. What doesn't get cheaper is knowing you: the decisions you already made, the threads you already had, the reasons behind both. That lives in your apps, unread by any of these tools, and it evaporates when the session ends or you switch vendor.

Timeln is that layer. Not a better assistant, but the memory the assistants borrow.

So: which one did I place wrong? And what else is missing?