I gave my life over to Meta’s AI agent and was blown away

Last week, I answered a call from an unknown number. “I reached Anthem Dental and am about to connect you,” a voice piped up.

The call was from an artificial intelligence “agent” created by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Ten minutes earlier, the AI agent had called my dental insurer, given it my member ID, answered a security question and waited on hold before transferring me to the representative – just as I had asked it to.

I was surprised by how much easier the agent had made it to deal with insurance. It was one of many tasks I accomplished with Muse, the AI agent app that Meta unveiled this month.

Muse is the first consumer AI agent from a major tech company that has become publicly available. The tech industry sees agents as the next frontier, far more capable than chatbots. Agents can roam the internet, sign in to websites, fill out spreadsheets and make phone calls on behalf of people – and that’s just the start.

To test Muse, I experimented with it nonstop for two weeks, giving over many aspects of my life to it. I had to trust Muse with my most personal data, which included connecting it to my bank accounts and email. Then I had it perform dozens of day-to-day tasks, including ordering my groceries, scheduling my meetings and setting my fantasy football lineups.

Two weeks in, I found Muse to be the most useful AI app I had ever used. One clarifying moment came after I connected my credit cards to Muse and asked it to track my spending in Google Sheets. I watched as it spun up tabs with hundreds of rows of data each in minutes, then flagged two duplicate subscriptions, which it cancelled for me. Then Muse used my email to request a refund for a free newspaper trial that had expired, saving me $US44.99 ($63).

Whether Muse and other AI agents will catch on broadly, I’m less sure. Agents require a level of trust that many people may be uncomfortable with, especially with a company, like Meta, that has had privacy issues. Some websites also restrict agents as part of their terms of service, like Amazon, which blocked access by Muse on Sunday.

Melissa Vadasserril, a senior director at Acoustic, an agentic marketing platform, said the arrival of Meta’s Muse reminded her of the 2010 unveiling of Apple’s digital personal assistant, Siri, which many people were slow to adopt.

“People just didn’t know what you could do with it,” Vadasserril said. With Muse, “I do think it’s a little early for the market, but I’m very curious to see where things go.”

My two weeks using Muse began by downloading the free app and signing in using my Instagram and Facebook accounts. (There are limits on free use, though, so people pay $US20 or $US100 a month if they want more.)

As I talked to the agent as if it were a chatbot, it suggested I name it Wren, embodied by an avatar of a cuddly brown bird. Our conversation then continued:

I quickly gave Wren access to my bank accounts and apps such as Google Docs, Gmail, Ticketmaster, OpenTable and Google Sheets, which all struck partnerships with Muse. From there, the experiments began.

I had a few goals in mind.