The race to run your to-do list

TL;DR: The battle of the personal AI agents is heating up, with Meta’s Muse making huge waves this week. For users, the big benefit is that these agents can remove some of the friction from your day (unless they make a mistake, of course). For AI firms: They get data on your entire life.

What happened: If the past few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that instead of swapping phone numbers or business cards, we might soon live in a world where people say, “I’ll have my AI agent reach out to yours.”

These handy robot assistants are all anyone can talk about lately, with Muse now topping the US App Store. But Meta has plenty of rivals vying to be the top personal AI agent in your life, including Siri AI, Google CC, Grok Bot, and a viral text message-based assistant called Instinct. (OpenAI might jump in soon, too, after hiring OpenClaw’s creator earlier this year to “drive the next generation of personal agents.”)

The agent to-do list is growing: The competition has gotten fiercer now that AI can start and finish tasks more proactively. Here are some of the errands people claim their agents have handled:

• Emailing a junk removal company to haul off a fallen tree branch in the yard.
• Haggling their phone bill down by $40 a month.
• Successfully tracking down jumbotron footage of them at the US Open, despite repeatedly being told by the event organizers that the video wasn’t available.
• Noticing that a user qualified for a flight refund, then canceling and rebooking to save them about $550.

In short, bots are apparently dealing with more of the annoying phone calls and other back-and-forths that we dread doing ourselves.

Still, it’s far from perfect—sometimes what’s supposed to be a shortcut just adds friction. Case in point: Resy temporarily banned one Instinct user because the AI kept pinging the platform to nab an in-demand table at a hot restaurant. Other tales of unsettling agent mishaps are piling up, too, making it harder to trust them with truly important tasks.

The agentic data gold mine: For tech companies, the draw of a personal agent is all the precious user data it can collect. That might be why Muse is so eager to suggest you hand over sensitive data (all the better to help you, of course)—like your bank account info, passport and license expiration dates, and even photos of what you eat.

Bottom line: The personal AI agent field is getting crowded, but Meta has the advantage of scale to draw users in (especially given Siri AI still has a waitlist)—and the social media giant’s offering people 100 million free tokens a week to butter them up. —WK