Poke AI, the agent that texts you first
Poke AI is a personal agent you reach by text message rather than through an app of its own. It is made by The Interaction Company of California, which joined Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent, in July 2026. Poke is not in our exam and we have not taken it apart, so this page is not a review. It is an account of what is publicly known about Poke, who said each part, and which questions a teardown would have to settle before anyone could say how it behaves with your accounts.
- Poke lives in your messaging apps. Its own documentation currently names Apple Messages, Telegram, WhatsApp and RCS, and that list has changed more than once this year.
- In June 2026 it became the first AI agent approved on Apple's Messages for Business platform, according to TechCrunch and to Poke's own release notes.
- Cognition announced the deal on 23 July 2026. TechCrunch put the value in the "low nine figures." Poke says the product works as before.
- We have not measured anything here. Every claim below is attributed to the vendor, the buyer, or a named third party.
What Poke AI is, in its makers' words
The Poke homepage sells it as a contact rather than a tool: "Meet Poke, your new favorite contact," followed by "Proactive, private, personal, and right in your texts." The documentation is plainer. It says you chat naturally to manage your email, schedule meetings, set reminders and search the web, and that the product is built by The Interaction Company of California. The company's own site, interaction.co, says little beyond the fact that it is building Poke.
The word that keeps recurring is proactive. Scott Wu, a Cognition co-founder, wrote in the announcement of the deal that Poke "messages you first, follows up with you, and feels less like software and more like a friend." That is a description of an agent that starts conversations, which is a different design from an assistant that waits to be asked.
The release notes give a sense of how the product has grown. In November 2025 the integration library was redesigned around first-party connections, including Linear, Todoist, Notion, Asana and GitHub. In March 2026 Poke opened up "without a bouncer or waitlist" and made Recipes generally available. In June it added a @poke.com email address you can use alongside your main inbox, and the ability to build and host a website at a poke.com subdomain.
Usage figures come only from the company and its buyer. Cognition says people exchanged more than 100 million messages with Poke in the three months before the deal, and that it is used by "hundreds of thousands of people." We have no way to check either number.
Which apps Poke AI works in, and why the list keeps moving
If you want to know where Poke is available, the answer depends on which page you read and when it was written.
The current docs say Poke "lives in Apple Messages, Telegram, WhatsApp, and RCS," and that it is available in all regions. The homepage names Messages, WhatsApp and Telegram. TechCrunch's June report said the service ran over SMS, Telegram and, in some markets, WhatsApp. Its July report listed iMessage, SMS, Telegram and, in some markets, WhatsApp. Every's personal agent comparison records Apple Messages, WhatsApp, Telegram and RCS.
The release notes explain part of the churn. On 2 February 2026, Poke added Telegram as an alternative to WhatsApp "while it is temporarily unavailable (except in Italy and Brazil)." Our own landscape entry had listed SMS among the channels. The current documentation names RCS instead and does not mention SMS, so we have dropped SMS from our description until a Poke page says otherwise.
None of this is unusual for a product that runs on other companies' messaging networks. It does mean the channel you get depends on rules Poke does not control, which is worth knowing before you build a habit around it.
The Apple Messages approval, and what it required
On 4 June 2026, Poke's release notes announced that it was available on Apple Messages "as the first and only AI product to be verified on the platform." TechCrunch reported the same day that Poke was the first AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, which TechCrunch later described as a standardized way for businesses to handle customer conversations inside Apple's Messages app.
The useful part of TechCrunch's report is the list of conditions. According to Sarah Perez's article, Poke had to verify that it could offer live support if needed, show that its agent was clearly identified as AI, submit testimonies from its messaging providers, and adapt its interface to Apple's guidelines. One concrete example: on Messages for Business it has to show link previews rather than inline links.
Apple was not available for comment, the article notes, so the approval is documented by Poke and by TechCrunch rather than by an Apple statement. The article was also corrected after publication. Co-founder Marvin von Hagen clarified that Poke "pays its messaging service provider on a per-user basis, not Apple directly." Some secondary write-ups still say Apple charges Poke per user; the corrected article does not.
For our purposes the approval says something about trust and presentation: Apple accepted that Poke identifies itself as AI and can hand a person a human. It says nothing about what Poke does inside a connected inbox, which is the question this site exists to ask.
Cognition, Devin, and what the deal changes for Poke AI
Cognition's announcement is dated 23 July 2026 and signed by Scott Wu. It does not use the word acquisition. It says Cognition is "welcoming" The Interaction Company, that Wu and his co-founder Walden Yan were early angel investors, and that both teams have bet on "always-on cloud agents." TechCrunch's July report is the source that calls it an acquisition and gives the "low nine figures" valuation.
What changes for users, according to each party:
- Poke's release notes say Poke "works exactly as before, and there's nothing you need to do."
- Cognition says its models and infrastructure will make Poke faster and more reliable.
- TechCrunch says nothing will immediately change through the end of the year, that Poke plans to remain on Apple's platform, and that next year the teams will experiment with Poke using Cognition's SWE-1.7 model for some tasks.
The same TechCrunch piece carries a detail worth keeping. Von Hagen said Poke had been expensive to run, which made it difficult to turn a profit. That is the founder's own account of the economics, and it is a reasonable thing to weigh when a product's model provider is about to change.
There is one smaller conflict. TechCrunch's July article says Poke "first launched in March 2026." The release notes have entries going back to November 2025, and TechCrunch's own June article mentions a seed round from the previous year. March 2026 is when Poke dropped its waitlist, which may be what the July article meant.
Poke AI pricing: plans, credits, and a human on the top tier
The pricing page lists three plans. Free costs nothing, needs no card, and lets you connect apps, email and calendar. Pro is $19 a month and adds frontier models for complex tasks, background automations and higher rate limits. Ultra is $199 a month and adds frontier models on every action, the highest limits, and pay-as-you-go usage beyond your credits.
The usage page explains what those limits mean. Free and Pro have an allowance that refills, and when you exceed it Poke keeps answering in a slower or lighter mode. Ultra works on credits, where "1 credit = $1 of usage," and included credits reset monthly without rolling over.
The most unusual line item is Poke Human, launched on 25 June 2026. The release notes say Poke can "bring in real people" for tasks such as restaurant reservations, phone calls, placing orders and booking rides. It is included with Ultra, and real-world expenses paid on your behalf are charged at cost. Every's table describes it the same way: Poke Human on Ultra assigns phone calls and other real-world tasks to a person.
That matters for anyone comparing agents by what they complete. A task finished by a person hired through the agent is a real outcome for the user, but it is not the same claim as an agent finishing it alone. A teardown would need to know when the handoff happens and who decides.
What the documentation says about control
Poke publishes more developer documentation than most products in this category, and reading it closely shows where the control questions sit.
Recipes, per the recipe docs, bundle onboarding context, first-message behavior, required integrations and a share link. A recipe author can share credentials so users skip setup for some integrations, and a recipe built on a local server only works while the author's tunnel stays open.
The MCP server docs say that once you connect a server, "Poke can discover and call the tools it exposes during conversations," choosing based on each tool's name, description and input schema. Every request carries an identifier for the Poke user. We found no description on that page of an approval step before a tool is called.
The API docs describe one inbound endpoint: an outside service sends a message, and "the entire body is forwarded to your agent as context." The documented uses include deploy failures, monitoring alerts and form submissions. That makes Poke something a script can address, not only a person.
Every's comparison fills in the rest from public material. It lists Poke as running on "Poke cloud," with the model provider not disclosed, tasks that can be scheduled or triggered, and memory that spans channels. Its row for approval before important actions has no documented entry for Poke, and its memory-controls cell is marked as not documented.
On data, the privacy policy, last updated 11 September 2026, says customer data may be used to improve the service, including model training, and that data from users who select Maximum Privacy will not be used for training. It names Gmail messages and Google Calendar events among the data accessed with your permission. It does not name a model provider.
One supplier has described part of the storage. Pierre Computer Company, which sells a product called Code.Storage, published a case study in August 2026 saying it gives Poke a Git-native storage layer for memory, recipes and integrations. That is a vendor describing its own customer. Nobody from The Interaction Company is quoted on the design.
Two similar names that are not Poke AI
Pokee AI is a different company. Its site describes an enterprise agent platform from Bellevue, Washington, with its own reasoning model and a seed round led by Point72 Ventures. It does not mention Poke or The Interaction Company. The names are close enough that search results mix them up, and our own records carry a warning for that reason.
OpenPoke is an open source project by Shlok Khemani, published on GitHub under the MIT license in September 2025. Its README calls it "a simplified, open-source take on Interaction Company's Poke assistant," covering email triage, reminders and background agents. It does not claim to be affiliated with The Interaction Company, and nothing we read from Poke or Cognition mentions it. It is a separate project built from outside, and its picture of Poke's internals is its author's reconstruction, not a description from the company. The repository has not been updated since September 2025.
What a teardown of Poke would have to answer
The products we have opened each have a page describing where they run, what tools they hold, what they remember and how they reach you, using the same axes every time. Poke has none of that here. These are the questions it would have to settle.
Where the work happens. "Poke cloud" is Every's phrase, and the model provider is undisclosed and, by TechCrunch's account, about to include Cognition's own models. What the agent actually holds at runtime, as opposed to the integration library and whatever MCP servers a user connects. What it remembers and whether you can open or correct it, since the only description of the storage comes from a supplier. What, if anything, it asks before sending an email, booking something, or calling a tool, given that neither the docs we read nor Every's table document an approval step. And when Poke Human takes over a task.
The comparison that comes to mind is Instinct, which also put its agent inside messaging apps rather than an app of its own. We compare the shape only. Instinct keeps a veto on irreversible steps through an approval card bound to the exact text it showed you, which we found by taking it apart. Whether Poke has an equivalent is unknown to us, and a description cannot answer it.
Until a teardown happens, Poke sits on the landscape list as recorded and nothing more. That is a statement about what we have checked, not about the product. Grok Bot has a page of the same kind, for a product that is in the exam but has not been opened either.
FAQ
What is Poke AI? A personal agent from The Interaction Company of California that you message like a contact. Its documentation says it handles email, meetings, reminders and web search, and connects to other apps through integrations and MCP servers.
Which apps can I use Poke in? Poke's documentation currently lists Apple Messages, Telegram, WhatsApp and RCS. Earlier reporting listed SMS, and WhatsApp availability has varied by country, so check Poke's own pages before relying on any one channel.
Who owns Poke now? Cognition, the maker of Devin, announced on 23 July 2026 that The Interaction Company was joining it. TechCrunch reported the deal as an acquisition valued in the low nine figures. Poke says the product continues as before.
Was Poke really the first AI agent on Apple Messages for Business? That is what Poke's release notes and TechCrunch's 4 June 2026 report say. Apple did not comment to TechCrunch, and we did not find a separate Apple statement.
Is Poke the same as Pokee AI or OpenPoke? No. Pokee AI is an unrelated enterprise agent company. OpenPoke is an independent open source project inspired by Poke, with no stated affiliation to its makers.
Have you tested Poke? No. It is not in our exam and we have not taken it apart. Results for the products we have run live on the scorecard, and how scoring works explains what a published figure would mean if Poke ever gets one.