In September, Meta launched a personal AI agent called Muse in the US.
It sends emails, books travel, fills in forms, haggles for products and checks out on your behalf - and it carries on working after you've closed the app.
More than 900,000 people downloaded it in its first six days, which put it at the top of the US App Store.
This is pivotal tech, and I don't think the world has woken up to it yet.
Meta is putting agents in the hands of grannies while a lot of board executives still don't understand what this stuff does.
It feels a bit like handing nuclear guns to churchgoers.
I'm certain most boards haven't realised the impact of this on their business yet.
I keep asking myself how a modern board can make decisions on AI without having understood what agents do to the work inside its own business.
They shift the operating model completely. Give one to every Facebook user and they shift the market as well.
That is why people are starting to look at Meta and think again. You may hate its data policies, but it is arming ordinary people with AI tools that do all their work for them.
And this is at a scale the frontier model companies can't match, because it has the users, the compute and the funding, with more than $130bn projected on AI this year.
It suddenly makes OpenAI and Anthropic look a little less relevant.
E-commerce shifts overnight
For now these are agents with the training wheels on, wearing armbands, head guards, knee pads and gum shields.
Only seven per cent of consumers say they would let an agent buy something without checking with them first. Amazon started blocking Muse on 20 September with a pop-up telling shoppers that an unauthorised AI agent breaks its conditions of use.
The next day Shopify announced it was plugging Muse into checkouts across its stores. Thank you very much, Amazon.
Inflexible companies lose in this scenario. Those who rely on friction and laziness to make margins will suffer here. Choking markets is no longer a model.
Those who provide ease of access and value add win. Agents are now bashing down these doors.
Alignment to customer needs is the best way through. Customers want convenience, price, service and easy experience.
Friction markets fall over
You can see the worry, because agents with better knowledge and insight can shift markets overnight and steer buying trends.
Picture millions of agents telling their owners that apples are cheaper at Supermarket A this week.
Supermarket A sells out of apples in minutes and Supermarket B, which isn't tuned into agentic price recommendations, tries to cut its own apple prices to catch up.
By then Supermarket A has already made five offers on other fruit and sold subscriptions to future apples, because its own agents were out there first.
This is Outcome Economics in practice, folks. It is the commoditisation of services, where all the friction you never knew you were paying for disappears.
Citrini Research, the firm that rattled the markets in February with a fictional memo about a future AI crisis in 2028, argues that a whole layer of the US economy makes its profit from people accepting a bad price to save themselves a few clicks.
Nearly 60 per cent of US subscribers pay for at least one service they don't use, wasting $26 a month on average.
But agents will now start to read the small print and cancel bad deals while you sleep.
Under this model, decisions will be made faster than your business can cope with.
Bank on the run?
Banks have the most to lose here.
Bank of America has told its clients that agents like Muse are a multi-year risk to the banking model, because an agent with access to your money could move cash out of accounts paying less than 0.1 per cent and into funds paying around 4 per cent.
Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo, went further on 27 September with a note asking whether an agentic bank run is coming.
Banks make much of their money by paying around 0.1 per cent on current accounts and lending that cash out at higher rates.
The only thing keeping it there is that someone has to notice they could earn more than 3 per cent elsewhere, decide to move it and then get round to doing the transfer.
But this is friction. It takes time and is full of admin. It is fiddly. In my language, it is known as 'ball ache'.
But an agent can sort this while you're eating pizza.
Sløk's worry is that if every household used an agent like Musee to chase the best return on its cash, banks would lose a large share of the cheap deposits they lend from.
This then becomes a problem for the whole financial system.
Now you might think - nah screw 'em. They've had it good for ages. But think again, young Padawan.
We have seen how quickly money can move once people decide to leave a bank, from Continental Illinois losing 30 per cent of its deposits in 10 days in 1984 to Silicon Valley Bank customers pulling $42bn in a single day in 2023. Remember Northern Rock?
This causes banking crashes and a lack of availability for people to borrow. It could be bad news.
Muse can already track spending, negotiate bills and hunt for deals so sweeping idle cash into a better account looks like the obvious next step.
Your challenge for this week
When are you going to learn about this stuff properly?
If you're not working with agents already and understanding their dangers, risks and opportunities in depth, what qualifies you to sit at the leadership table today?
This is going to be part of your market and operating model. Years of experience are great, but you have to start looking at what's coming.
I have conveniently written a course specifically to help you address this challenge.
"Working with agents" is a full-day course for leaders who need to get up to speed on new operating models and market dynamics through their own skills and understanding.
It's run by Ewan MacLeod, president of the City CIO Club, serial CIO and a real AI expert, teaching business all over the world about how to work with agents.
Get on the case.
Dan
Upcoming courses by The Executive Summary
Our courses are taught by real executives in central London and live online.
Here is what is coming up.
Working with AI agents · Tue 10 November
A full day with Ewan MacLeod building agents on Claude, Copilot, Gemini or ChatGPT and putting them to work on your own job.
Selling to the C-suite · Thu 12 November
How to get the meeting with a chief executive and win the deal once you are in the room.
Repositioning you · Tue 17 November
Get known for the right things as your career moves to its next role.
Presence · Mon 23 November
Hold your own in executive rooms, make your point and steer the outcome with your voice, body language and the way you use the room.
AI governance · Thu 26 November
The rules, owners and risk register your board needs before AI spreads across the business.
On stage and on camera · Thu 3 December
A full day of speaker and media training for leaders who speak for their company.
Courses are also run as a private session for your leadership team. See me after class for details.
The City CIO Club: AI dinner, Wednesday 11 November
The City CIO Club meets next on Wednesday 11 November at The Walbrook Club for an evening on AI with senior technology leaders, held under the Chatham House Rule.
The club is an invitation-only programme from The Executive Summary for CIOs, CTOs and COOs heading for global leadership and board roles. If your technology chief should be in the room, reply to this email.
Good luck to Tim Hames
Our good friend and geopolitics expert Tim Hames holds his book launch tonight at the National Liberal Club. War or Peace? The United States and China, 2026–2049 is the latest in Tim's series on world affair predictions. Several members of the City CIO Club and readers of the Executive Summary will be going.
Get your AI agent to buy his book here.
Dinner at Parliament
Next week, a few of the City CIO Club members and yours truly will be heading for dinner with the Indo-European Business Forum, where the Minister for AI will be present.
The Mayfair Collective Christmas Ball
On Wednesday 25 November the club also joins The Mayfair Collective for its black tie Christmas ball at The Royal Lancaster Hotel, raising money for The Change Foundation.
If you would like to come to this, you don't strictly speaking need to be a member of the City CIO Club, but you do need to be a partner of The Executive Summary if not. Give me a shout if you want to come.
