How your AI agent may level the playing field against companies
As AI agents start negotiating on behalf of consumers and replacing work inside firms, the real contest of the next decade is over who keeps the savings. This article is one of a three-part series examining the risks and reality of autonomous AI agents.
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A worker in New York unloading packages from online agent Amazon, which has blocked agentic shopping.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Agentification. Remember the word. It describes the moment artificial intelligence stopped merely answering our questions and started acting on our behalf – negotiating, cancelling, buying, replacing workers. On the consumer side, that shift is already in people’s pockets. On the corporate side, it shows up in firms’ payrolls. Together, these two forces are converging on economies from opposite directions, and the collision will determine who captures the value AI creates: households or firms.
Consumers can now have their personal digital assistants in the form of Muse, an app recently released by Meta, which you can get on your phone. It can trawl the internet for you, negotiate deals, complete transactions and even make phone calls on your behalf – and it’s free. xAI has released its own personal digital tool called Grok Bot, ChatGPT offers something similar in its “agent mode” and Google is reportedly working on its own Muse-type app.