![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/-S3840x2556-FPNG.png\"\/)
Mark Zuckerberg, wearing Meta Glasses, stands in front of the mascot for the company\u2019s new personal AI agent, Muse. | Source: Andrej Sokolow\/picture alliance via Getty Images<\/p>\nBy the time Amanda Vicars realized she forgot to buy her husband a gift, it was already his birthday. The busy nonprofit executive took out her phone and asked Muse, Meta\u2019s new AI agent, to order flowers and chocolate and send them to their San Ramon home.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The gifts arrived late, she said \u2014 even though she\u2019d paid extra for priority delivery. The bot, which she\u2019d nicknamed Ren, suggested she call for a refund. \u201cCan\u2019t you do that?\u201d Vicars recalled asking it. Obediently, Ren got her a $50 refund, something Vicars said she wouldn\u2019t have bothered to do herself.<\/p>\n
Vicars is part of a wave of Bay Area early adopters embracing AI agents \u2014 digital assistants previously used primarily for technical tasks \u2014 to manage their personal lives. This group seems to be especially giddy to have a new option to handle the drudgery of everyday life. They\u2019re asking agents to order lunch, book flights, nab restaurant reservations, and clean up their email inboxes \u2014 gladly handing over access to personal data and power over basic decisions, all in the name of optimization.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While an AI chatbot can answer questions and put together presentations or generate an image, an agent will take action and work independently to accomplish a task. Using agents requires a leap of faith, giving them access to email accounts, payment data, and other sensitive information so they can move about in the world as if they are you.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mark Zuckerberg, wearing Meta Glasses, stands in front of the mascot for the company\u2019s new personal AI agent, Muse. | Source: Andrej Sokolow\/picture alliance via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Many early adopters were already familiar with the technology, having used existing enterprise-facing agents for work. They got their feet wet with Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code and Cursor, then moved to open-source AI agent platforms like OpenClaw and Hermes. In August, the crowd became enamored with Instinct, an agent that works with iMessage. The company was founded by a 23-year-old and is valued at $10 billion.<\/p>\n
But the real mainstream breakthrough came in recent months, as major tech firms started rolling out AI agents for regular people \u2014 some for free, others with paid subscriptions. There\u2019s SpaceXAI\u2019s Grok Bot, Google\u2019s Gemini Spark, Meta\u2019s Muse, and OpenAI\u2019s dots<\/a>, each packaged as a personal assistant with a cutesy mascot. Muse became the No. 1 downloaded free app in the Apple App Store and Google Play store less than two weeks after its release (opens in new tab)<\/a>, surpassing ChatGPT.\u00a0<\/p>\n On social media, excited users are trading workflows and suggestions for use cases, like having their agents come up with dinner ideas or screen nannies. At Dreamforce and Tech Week in San Francisco, agents were the topics of multiple discussions and the theme of after-parties, including a Great Gatsby-style \u201cAgent Economy Gala,\u201d complete with a humanoid robot and sparkling wine pyramid.\u00a0<\/p>\n One San Francisco tech worker at The AI Conference at Pier 48 used an agent to scrape local Facebook Marketplace listings for a specific ice axe for his next hiking trip. Over the summer, members of FoundHer House, a local all-female hacker house, used an AI agent to coordinate and book a group getaway to Tahoe.\u00a0<\/p>\n The people building the agents have been most vocal about how they\u2019re using them.<\/p>\n Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview (opens in new tab)<\/a> Monday that he uses his agent to coach him on mixed martial arts technique. Alexandr Wang, Meta\u2019s 29-year-old chief AI officer, said he has his Muse agent \u2014 named \u201cOiler\u201d \u2014 buy him obscure tea \u201cfrom a random farm in Taiwan\u201d on a weekly basis.<\/p>\n Haz Hubble, 28, founded a startup making a textable AI agent, Pally. He compared it to an executive assistant or \u201ca smart university grad with a laptop.\u201d Hubble estimated that he texts his agent 50 to 100 times daily to handle work and personal matters. Most recently, he gave Pally his health insurance information and told it to find him an in-network optometrist\u00a0 who could change his eyeglass lenses. The agent made calls to about 10 offices before booking him an appointment for the following day.\u00a0<\/p>\n At The AI Conference, Jaclyn Konzelmann, director of product management at Google Labs, spoke to an overflowing room about her agents. She uses them mostly to help with parenting tasks and projects for her kids. Konzelmann had AI make a scary story podcast for her 5-year-old daughter, then put it on Spotify (opens in new tab)<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n She has no loyalty to a single AI agent and is experimenting with all of them. Konzelmann hasn\u2019t given them full control of her data and made a separate email for the podcast\u2019s Spotify account. But she looks forward to the day when she can trust her agent enough to hand over the keys.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it is worth the time savings on the clicks,\u201d she told The Standard. \u201cThere\u2019s safe ways to do it without giving over your full credit card, and that\u2019s where I need to play around a little bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone at The AI Conference was sold on the idea of handing their logins to the bots. \u201cWhy do you need access to all of my information?\u201d said Sarika, an Atlanta-based product manager who declined to share her last name.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI connected it to my email, and all of a sudden it knew everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Amanda Vicars, nonprofit executive <\/p>\n There have already been instances of consumer agents gone awry. One user on X (opens in new tab)<\/a>, Shane Mac, CEO of XMTP Labs, said his Grok Bot AI agent posted his bank balance to his company\u2019s Slack without his permission. YouTuber Matt Robb posted (opens in new tab)<\/a> about his Muse agent mishandling a Facebook Marketplace transaction and giving his address to a stranger.<\/p>\n Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is arguably one of the few people who reads the privacy policy pop-up before using a new technology.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my job,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She\u2019s not using any of the AI agents because she hasn\u2019t seen a use case that would make her life easier, the way the tech companies are promising. King advises people to be cautious if they use an AI agent and to not assume that their data will be secure.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI am really concerned about the access to data that agents need, and so that trade-off for me right now is just too great,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t see a gain if I have to give something unfettered access.\u201d<\/p>\n Vicars is aware of how much data her agent can access. \u201cI connected it to my email, and all of a sudden it knew everything,\u201d she said. But when asked about privacy, she said, \u201cOh, I don\u2019t care about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Daniel Tian, CEO of Photon, recognizes the security concerns associated with AI agents and says they will need to be addressed for the bots to reach mass adoption. Tian, 22, is building a startup that connects AI agents to iMessage and WhatsApp for easy texting with bots.\u00a0<\/p>\n He used an agent to buy sought-after tickets for \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d for himself and his girlfriend. Tian told the agent what days and times he was available and set it loose to hunt for the tickets. And yes, it has his credit card on file.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI give most of the access, to be honest. I\u2019m fine,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m part of the pioneer group. We\u2019re the ones that might be sacrificing some of our data privacy and stuff in exchange for pushing the technology forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the time Amanda Vicars realized she forgot to buy her husband a gift, it was already his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,19534,37947,2269,106013,3408,30486,101,103,102,74329,104,106,105,8170,995,1970],"class_list":["post-501059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-chatbots","tag-chatgpt","tag-future-of-work","tag-openai","tag-robot","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-self-optimization","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-startups","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}