Hi everyone, thanks for coming back to Customer Futures. Each week I unpack the fundamental shifts around Personal Agents, digital customer relationships and Empowerment Tech.
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Hi folks,
Welcome to Part 4 of my five-part series unpacking Meta’s new personal AI agent, Muse.
So far, we’ve explored how Muse gets its own computer, memory and tools (Part 1). How it separates intelligence from authority (Part 2). And why an agent acting on your behalf needs to be recognised as a legitimate representative, rather than simply impersonating you (Part 3).
Now let’s look at what all this means for businesses.
Because once customers have their own intelligent agents, able to remember things, make decisions, use tools and interact with services, some of our most basic assumptions about customer experience, marketing, personalisation and commerce start to look rather fragile.
And perhaps the most interesting opportunities aren’t the ones we’re talking about.
Here’s where we’re going today:
The most intimate customer relationship ever created
What happens to marketing, loyalty and customer experience?
Personalisation has an ugly twin
The opportunities we haven’t imagined yet
Whose side is the agent on?
Let’s go.
1. The most intimate customer relationship ever created
There’s a reason Muse needs memory.
Yes, an agent that knows nothing about you can still be useful. It can search for flights, summarise documents, answer questions and maybe book a restaurant.
But it will remain fairly transactional.
The real opportunity comes when the agent starts to understand your wider context. Your preferences, relationships, commitments, financial position, previous decisions, upcoming plans and all the other bits of personal data scattered across your digital life.
That’s where Muse’s architecture gets interesting.
As we covered in Part 1, Meta is giving the agent its own computing environment, with persistent memory and access to tools. And in Part 2, we explored how the agent can use that environment to work across different services.
Put those things together, and you get something very different from a chatbot. Rather, it’s a personal agent that can build up context over time, use it to understand what you need, and then do something about it.
I’ve written before that this is going to create a massive AI data protection problem. But in my view what’s worse, and will be an even bigger issue, is that we’re about to face an AI intimacy problem. At internet scale.
Because the more useful these agents become, the more they will need to know about us.
But what happens when our AI-powered digital assistants can’t access the personal context locked inside the other apps we use?
Your banking information is over here. Your travel bookings are over there. Your messages, calendar, email, purchase history and preferences are scattered across dozens of different services.
Without access to that context, even the cleverest AI agent can end up being rather dumb.
This is why portable customer context matters so much. And it brings us back to one of the main things I’ve been saying for years.
The only place with a genuine 360-degree view of the customer is the customer themselves.
Not the airline. Not the bank. Not the retailer. Not the insurance company. Each of them only sees a fragment of you. No, the individual is the only place where those fragments can come together. And personal agents can finally give customers the tools to make that complete picture useful.
And that’s where things get interesting for businesses.
2. What happens to marketing, loyalty and customer experience?
Consider how businesses compete for customers today.
They invest in advertising to get our attention. Search optimisation to get discovered. Websites and apps to help us navigate their services. Personalisation to make their offers more relevant. And loyalty programmes to encourage us to come back.
Entire teams are dedicated to improving conversion rates, reducing abandonment and persuading customers to take the next step.
But what happens when the customer sends an agent instead?
An agent doesn’t care how beautifully designed your website is. It won’t care about the advertising, the carefully positioned upsell or the countdown timer telling you that only two rooms remain.
It will simply be trying to achieve an outcome. To check the cancellation terms. Compare the total price. Make the reservation.
Meta’s new personal agent Muse makes this a much more immediate question because it’s being designed to use the same digital services that humans use, including browsers, tools and APIs.
As we explored in Part 3, this creates a new problem for companies everywhere. How do businesses know whether the agent is genuinely authorised to act for the customer?
Today, some organisations are already blocking agents that appear to be impersonating people. Others are exploring more explicit ways to recognise and support delegated access.
But let’s assume that gets solved. So what happens next?
For a start, customer experience starts to become something the customer assembles, rather than something each business delivers on its own.
Excellent stuff. Let me repeat another of my favourite sayings: The customer experience is about to be disrupted… by the customer themselves.
Why?
Because an AI travel agent acting for a customer can now respond to disruption across the entire trip, rather than waiting for the customer to deal with each provider separately. The personal agent can coordinate flight details, hotels, transfers, insurance, tickets and restaurant bookings across multiple providers.
(For those groaning about yet another tired case study of the ‘agentic travel agent’, no, I’m not saying that hotel reservations will magically disappear. Rather, I am saying that AI agents will be able to do things that I can’t, like handle travel disruption and loyalty points in ways that I can’t or wouldn’t even think of).
Anyway, the point here is that my personal agent, whether that’s Muse, Grok, Instinct, Dots or one of the manby others about to hit the market, won’t follow any of those carefully constructed customer journeys designed by businesses.
And the same applies to loyalty.
Today, businesses often measure loyalty through repeat visits, app engagement, points earned and purchases made. But what on earth does loyalty mean when an agent can continuously compare the alternatives?
Perhaps it becomes more important to be genuinely competitive, reliable and easy to deal with. Perhaps loyalty programmes become machine-readable benefits that agents can calculate and compare. And perhaps customers become more loyal because their agents can finally make full use of the benefits they’ve already earned?
There are some big questions here for advertising, customer acquisition and brand discovery too.
If an agent is doing the research, how does a brand get considered? How does it explain its differentiation? How does it persuade the customer that its offer is better?
And what happens when the business itself has an agent? Rather than forcing the customer’s agent through a website, the two agents will communicate directly, checking availability, negotiating terms, verifying eligibility and arranging fulfilment.
We’re beginning to see the ingredients for a very different commercial world.
Not necessarily fewer customer relationships.
But customer relationships that work very, very differently.
3. Personalisation has an ugly twin
This is your regular reminder that there’s an uncomfortable consequence of hyper-personalisation.
For years, businesses have argued that collecting more and more customer data is a Good Thing because it enables ‘more relevant experiences’.
And sometimes it does.
But there’s another side to that argument.
The more a business knows about you, the more accurately it may be able to estimate what you’re willing to pay. Not just what a product is worth in the market, but what it’s worth to you, right now.
Think about the possibilities
The Surge Pricing For Everything Economy. How many other people want this at the same time?
The How Badly Do You Need This Economy. How urgently do you need it?
Or the Personal Surplus Economy. How much extra could you personally be persuaded to pay?
We’ve already seen forms of dynamic and personalised pricing in different markets. AI will make those techniques considerably more sophisticated, cheaper and faster. Weapons-grade pricing engines, in real time, based on real context.
Wowsers.
But now imagine the reverse.
What if your personal agent could recognise those tactics? We have to assume that there will be a loyalty-marketing-sales tactics arms race coming soon.
Where my agent can check whether the offer I’ve received is competitive, identify unusual price changes, compare alternatives, challenge hidden charges or negotiate better terms.
Where my agent can notice that my insurance renewal has quietly increased, that a subscription is no longer worth paying for, or that I’m eligible for a better deal elsewhere.
The same personal context that makes it possible for businesses to target customers more precisely will also help customers make better decisions for themselves.
And it doesn’t stop at pricing.
Personal agents will compare contract terms, spot misleading claims, identify unnecessary products or question recommendations that don’t seem to match my actual needs.
Personalisation will become something the customer does to the market, rather than simply something the market does to the customer.
Like so much of what’s going on here, it’s another rather important customer-business reversal.
4. The opportunities we haven’t imagined yet
We also need to remember there’s the same old trap we fall into whenever a new technology arrives: We imagine it replacing something we already do.
When electric motors first appeared, people naturally thought about replacing existing mechanical systems in the factories and business. But nobody predicted that electric motors would eventually show up in cars to automatically move the seats and wing mirrors, or would appear in the kitchen refrigerator door to crush ice.
When the web arrived, we imagined things like digital magazines and e-newspapers. Then social media transformed how people discovered, created and shared information.
Likewise, when mobile phones arrived, we thought the big opportunity was making phone calls anywhere. Then Uber turned up.
New technologies are first applied to old problems. And we’re doing exactly the same thing with personal agents.
Just look at the frothy newsfeeds about automated flight booking, seamless meeting schedules, instant coffee ordering and so on. All useful. All (probably) worth doing. But it’s not where the biggest opportunities will emerge.
Ask yourself this: What happens when your agent is continuously looking out for you?
Perhaps it notices a suspicious payment request before you act on it. Or identifies a scam by combining signals from your messages, transaction history and trusted contacts. Perhaps it recognises that your travel plans are about to be disrupted and rearranges the connections before you’ve even seen the notification. Or spots that you’re paying more for a service than comparable customers, and quietly finds you a better option.
Now take that a step further.
What happens when personal agents start working together?
Could they combine purchasing power? Identify patterns of unfair treatment across thousands of customers? Negotiate collective deals? Help individuals coordinate around shared interests?
These aren’t all things Muse can do today. They’re examples of what becomes possible when personal agents have memory, tools, context and the authority to act.
And some of the most valuable applications will be things we haven’t even thought of yet.
That’s the exciting part.
We’re still looking at agents through the lens of today’s customer journeys.
The much bigger opportunity will be the new services, experiences and markets that emerge when customers have intelligent, persistent digital representatives of their own.
5. Whose side is the agent on?
There’s another, rather uncomfortable question running across all of this.
Paul Walsh recently described Meta’s Muse as “a commercial surveillance network disguised as a personal assistant”. It’s a pretty provocative view. And I agree with the underlying questions, especially about Zuck’s track record (and of course the many, many difficult court cases).
Because the more context an agent has, the more useful it can become. And the more intimate that context becomes, the more valuable it could be to anyone trying to influence the customer.
Which brings us to the question I’ve been trying to get to all along:
What happens when the agent that’s supposed to represent the customer also works for a company whose business model depends on influencing that customer?
Remember what we’ve established across this mini-series of posts.
Muse can have its own computing environment and memory. It can use tools and interact with external services. Its actions can be governed by permissions. And it can potentially present itself as an authorised representative rather than pretending to be the human customer.
Those are important foundations. But none of them, on their own, guarantees that the agent will act in the customer’s best commercial interests. An agent could be secure, correctly authorised and technically compliant, while still favouring particular products, partners or commercial outcomes.
And as personal agents become more capable, those distinctions will matter massively.
Because there’s a big difference between an agent that knows you, an agent that can act for you, and an agent that genuinely works for you.
That’s where we’re going in Part 5.
Who controls the agent? Who controls its memory? Can you move your personal context elsewhere? How do you know whether recommendations are independent? And what happens when the next generation of walled gardens isn’t built around apps or websites, but around the agents themselves?
Personal agents will sit on a spectrum of control. Who decides what it can and can’t do? And are they truly ‘personal’ if someone else controls the rules, or can turn them off whenever they want?
OK, yes, as of October 2026 we now have flying cars, thanks to Elon.
But answering these questions about who controls personal agents is one of the most important things we should be doing at the moment.
See you in Part 5.
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