One month later The meta With the launch of Muse, the personal agent that has quickly become a viral sensation, a group of companies are coming together to try to simplify the process of introducing technology into the business world.
Meta, WalmartStripe and a handful of other companies publish what they call a “personal agent protocol.” It is an open standard intended to dictate how artificial intelligence agents can interact with businesses.
Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Sales force co-CEO Bret Taylor is part of the group. Taylor, who is also president of OpenAI and leads the initiative, told CNBC in an interview that companies have a lot of work to do to determine how and when personal agents can access information.
“Companies will know whether it’s a personal agent or a real person. For a lot of companies, there’s a risk that you don’t want just a random bot that’s not acting on behalf of a person to have access to that service,” Taylor said. “It’s kind of chaos until such a standard exists.”
Meta’s Muse has become the most popular and animated version of personal AI agents since hitting the market in early September. He rose to the top of Apple App Store and remains there, ahead of ChatGPT. However, Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta Agents, citing concerns about website scraping.
Amazon also blocked Perplexity’s AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging that the company took steps to “hide” its AI agents so they could continue to crawl Amazon’s website without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit an “intimidation tactic.”
For the new standard, Taylor compared it to the experience of logging into other websites with Google or Facebook IDs, a technology he worked on when he was a technical lead at Facebook. He said the practice would make authentication easier so businesses know if they’re dealing with a bot and provide visibility into what personal agents are actually doing through these websites.
David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former chief technology officer at Stripe, emphasized security. For agents to function properly, he said, customers must share their credit card and personal information, and the new standard creates a certain level of visibility and control.
“We’re setting rails that we hope personal agents and sales agents can navigate in the future,” Singleton said, comparing it to email. “If you think about email, it works really well because it’s a standard that everyone can use to talk to each other, and we think it will be pretty similar.”
Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the United States and is “growing quickly.”
“What we’re finding is that people love using Muse for all kinds of things, like signing up their kids for classes, finding and buying the best gifts, planning that dentist appointment you’ve been putting off for six months,” he said. “We need a mechanism to make this go faster and easier.”
Although OpenAI and Anthropic are not present at the moment, Taylor said he expects the AI giants to participate and indicated he would be “really disappointed” if it wasn’t used by competitors.
“The goal is to be an open standard,” Taylor said.
Gn bussni
