What happens when your employees’ AI agents start coming to work? (Spolier: It’s bad)

Personal AI agents are having a moment. Meta recently launched a personal agent it named Muse, and saw an estimated 2.8 million installs in its first 12 days, outpacing ChatGPT’s own mobile debut. Meanwhile, Instinct, a startup building a personal agent you can text or call, just raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. SpaceXAI launched its Grok Bot agent in August, and most recently, on September 29, OpenAI launched Dots, agents built to pursue goals in the background with minimal oversight. So, what are personal agents? A simple way to understand them is to think of them as employees that are always on. You give them a goal, you give them the access and tools they need to achieve that goal, and then you get out of the way and let them get to work. The key new piece of the puzzle, the thing that is driving the hype, is that these goals are real-world goals—things like doing the shopping, making dinner reservations, replying to emails, filing insurance claims, and so on. The potential productivity gains are enormous. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and the upside comes with serious risks that business leaders must urgently address. This piece tells you what you ne…

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