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AI personal assistants are free for anyone to use. But does everyone even need one?

Scott Catto

A lot of tech advances take something that used to be a luxury and give it to everyone. Clothes cleaned for you used to mean paying someone to come scrub them. Washing machines. A personal driver ready for you at any hour of the day was very expensive. Uber. Instinct and Meta’s Muse are doing the same thing for personal assistants. The question is, do most of us not have a personal assistant because it’s too expensive, or because we just don’t need one? If you only have the occasional trip or boring online task, you probably won’t stay in the habit of using one. But now that the price is zero, maybe we’ll find a lot more use cases than we think?

Discussion

FalseProfit

I can't speak for everyone, but I think AI agents can be useful, but are not incredibly useful...yet. The ideal agent would work like a chief of staff: tracking your ongoing projects, triaging what comes up, filtering out the noise, and advising *you* on how to spend *your* time. Two things stand in the way. The first is judgment. In my experience, most agents can't yet weigh conflicting instructions or make sound calls reliably enough to work unsupervised. What they do well — defined, formulaic, repetitive tasks — tends to be lower-value, and there's less of that work in personal life than at the office. The second is access. Even when an agent can do a task, it often isn't allowed to. Data silos and anti-bot tools like CAPTCHAs get in the way. Meta's Muse, for example, would be ideal for researching products on Amazon, but Amazon blocks it from its listings. That's no accident. Agents threaten business models built on owning the customer's attention: sponsored listings, upsells, the browsing that leads to impulse buys. An agent that goes straight to the best option skips all of that, so expect many companies to fight hard to keep agents out. How does this resolve? Legislation could force open access, but that's slow and uncertain. Without it, we get an arms race between anti-bot and anti-anti-bot technology. The likelier outcome may be a third path: platforms build their own agents and let in only the outside ones that pay. That would ease the access problem while recreating the silo problem — a dozen narrow assistants, none with the full view a real chief of staff needs. Either way, agents will stay meaningfully limited for a while.

Sean
In reply to a comment

I think the “personal assistant” framing may actually be too narrow. Most people probably don’t have a human assistant because they don’t have enough delegable tasks. But almost everyone has the harder problem FalseProfit points to: deciding what deserves their attention in the first place. The interesting version to me is less “book my flight” and more a personal chief of staff that understands what I care about, how I actually spend my time, the commitments I’ve made to myself, and can say: “You told me this matters. Is what you’re doing right now actually serving it?” That feels like a much bigger unlock than making task execution free. The hard part is judgment and building a persistent model of the person, not just tool access.

Siddhartha Saxena

The biggest problem is that people don't know what to give to these agents and these agents can't be useful till they know what is going on in the users life. This is the trap that churns off even the most loyal users in the category,

FalseProfit
In reply to a comment

Yes, but I wouldn't put this on users. The bigger problem is context: give a model too little and it misses what's going on; give it too much and it fixates on the wrong details. Rebecca Kaden at USV wrote a good piece on this last year (her example: ChatGPT remembered her son's love of the Knicks and started incorporating the Knicks into every response). It's gotten better since, but it's not solved. And as you point out, curating that context takes real effort from the user, which undercuts the point of automation. https://blog.usv.com/in-favor-of-forgetting

Scott Catto
In reply to a comment

This is a great point. A lot of the demo videos of these things, make it seem like that's what they'll be able to do (let you arrive at your desk with the correct things already done and some next steps for you), but the proactiveness combined with the correct judgement isn't there yet on any that Ive tried

Scott Catto
In reply to a comment

I think as (or if) they become a used by enough people, then platforms will start losing them, because even if ACV (or equivalent) goes down, its better than it going to zero if the agent just takes them elsewhere

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