Best alternatives to Toyo in 2026

Hiring a human executive assistant is expensive and usually only makes sense once a business is big enough to need one full-time. Toyo tries to fill that gap with AI: instead of opening a dashboard or learning a new app, you just text it — the same way you'd text an assistant — asking it to look into a potential client, draft a follow-up email, or keep an eye on what a competitor is doing, and it goes and does the work in the background. If something is urgent or too nuanced for text, Toyo can call your phone directly. Toyo runs as a cloud-based AI agent reachable over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, phone calls or a web browser. It executes multi-step business tasks autonomously — prospect research, outreach drafting, competitor monitoring, custom tool creation without code — while keeping a persistent memory of your business context and preferences across sessions, and it connects into your existing apps and tools. Actions with external consequences (sending an email, making a purchase) sit behind human approval gates rather than firing automatically. It's built by a founding team (Damien Tanner, Stuart Bowness, Aidan Hornsby, Erin Sullivan) backed by Frontline, Inovia and TSIC, explicitly aimed at the tens of millions of small businesses that can't justify a full engineering team or a dedicated ops hire.