Takeaways
- Today we’re previewing our work on Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard Meta (Muse and Meta Business Agent) and Sierra are developing along with industry partners at Genesys, NiCE, Decagon, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart that defines how personal agents interact with businesses.
- We're also sharing more about the standards we built Muse to follow on the open web, where it acts as an extension of the person who sent the request. We think all personal agents should be built this way.
People love using Muse, and the stories that have really stuck out to us are the practical ones. Muse booking an activity for your family. Finding and buying the best gifts. Scheduling the dentist appointment you have put off for six months. Sorting out a confusing support issue without you having to wait on hold.
Muse does all this by giving every person their own computer and browser in the cloud, with access to the internet where Muse can run code and use the web under the user’s direction to achieve their goals.
People Love Using Muse With Businesses
Many of those moments involve a business. Today Muse buys things, makes appointments, and resolves support questions through a connector or directly on the business’s website.
This is where personal agents create a lot of value, for people and for businesses alike. Someone who asks Muse to book with you or reorder from you has already decided to be your customer. When their agent can find what they need and finish what they came to do, the business gets a completed sale and the person gets their time back.
Behind Every Muse Visit Is a Customer
Some businesses have responded to personal agents by blocking them on their websites. We understand why. New ways of engagement are hard to plan for — a site owner might reasonably worry: What about load spikes, abuse, liability? Can we maintain the customer relationship? Can we still guide and influence the user’s whole journey with our brand?
One thing to keep in mind: Muse acts when a person asks it to. When someone asks Muse to book with you, reorder from you, or fix an issue — they've chosen you. If Muse is turned away, they experience it as not being able to do business with you. As more people hand errands to agents, more of your current and future customers will arrive this way.
Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it. We'd rather work with businesses to address the underlying concerns than see them lose that customer.
A Better Path Together
There is a path that is good for users and good for businesses. It starts with clear norms, gives businesses more predictable control, and evolves toward a more efficient way for agents to work together.
How Muse Browses Today
Our starting point is simple. When browsing, Muse behaves like a personal assistant acting for a single person, held to sensible standards. It completes the user’s task while respecting the legitimate interests of site owners and the public.
Before acting, Muse applies two tests:
The “one honest person” test. Would a reasonable, honest person doing this by hand do it this way and at this scale? A person can refresh a page 500 times an hour, but they would not. A person can make five accounts to redeem a one-per-household coupon, but they should not. A person can write a fake five-star review of their own restaurant, but they should not.
The “if every agent did this” test. If every Muse user made this request, would the underlying system still function? One person hoarding tee times is annoying. Every agent hoarding tee times breaks the market.
When a request crosses the line, Muse does what it can, skips what it cannot, and explains the difference to the user.
For consequential actions, Muse is designed to continue only with explicit user approval. It will seek approval for sensitive actions taken on your behalf like signing in, completing a reservation, or making a purchase.
Therefore, the way Muse browses today is designed to work well for people and respect the needs of businesses. Working together with our partners, we’re building additional capabilities to make the experience better for everyone.
New Capabilities
We’re building the next set of capabilities with Sierra and our partners across retail, payments, and customer experience. That work includes the protocol we’re designing together to handle authentication, empower consumers and give companies visibility into what personal agents do through their websites, APIs or company agents. It will be open for anyone to implement.
Make Agents Predictable and Welcome
Businesses that want to welcome personal agents should be able to guide them to behave in a predictable way. That predictability will give users faster, smoother operations, and businesses confidence they can offer their best customer experience through agents.
This starts with a business being able to guide personal agents in how to use its website, or refer the agent to skills and connectors that work better at scale. Instead of learning how to navigate each time via trial and error, Muse can follow the business’s preferred path: use this flow for bookings, use that connector for order tracking, check this structured source for real-time inventory.
From Browser Automation to Agent to Agent
Using the browser is a good way to use rails that already exist. But it has inefficiencies. Loading full pages, clicking through flows designed for human eyes, and parsing visual layouts is slower and more brittle than it needs to be.
Even better in many cases is a connector that gives Muse direct access to a business’s APIs for read and write actions essential to their customer experience.
Ultimately, however, we believe many businesses will benefit from having their own business agents that can engage directly with Muse. A personal agent should not have to interpret a support center article when it can ask the business agent a direct question and get an authoritative answer. The result is lower latency, fewer errors, and a reliable experience that feels smooth.
An Industry Standard for agent to agent
We think things like this work best when multiple parties come together to define the rails. Email took off because everyone agreed on addressing, message transport and delivery. No one owns it, anyone can build on it. That’s why we’re building this as an open standard that anyone can implement.
Agent commerce will be enabled by the same alignment to solve practical questions and reduce transaction friction. We look forward to sharing more on how we’re designing the protocol with our partners to address how personal agents can securely convey user identity, how businesses can steer personal agents for efficient website use or towards optimized APIs and skills, and how personal agents talk to business agents on the user’s behalf.
We’ve designed the core parts of the protocol that define these new rails and the working group brings together partners from across the industry to completely build them together, and get customer experiences live quickly.
Personal agents are opening up a better way for people and businesses to work together. We're looking forward to building it together.