Happy Monday!
Welcome to the second edition of At Your Service, the weekly breakdown of all things AI Assistant and the agentic economy.
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All the best,
David
What’s Trending?
Meta launched Muse Wonder Meta announced Muse Wonder, a new family of frontier models built for personal and professional agent work. Alexandr Wang says it adds "active memory," so Muse can remember what you told it days or weeks ago and use that on future tasks. On Cheeky Pint with John Collison, Wang said Muse is "one of the first products where people are fully delegating purchases to the agents." Zuck added that "every business is going to have agents too." |  |
AI Assistants Rank on 14-Day Retention Muse's D14 retention numbers last week were shared, and they're close to ChatGPT's, sitting at 22.5% compared to ChatGPT’s 26.8%. I personally messaged dozens of iMessage based AI-assistant founders to get a better grasp of what the general industry D14 stats are looking like. Self-reported numbers ranged from ~20% to a handful that independently reported sitting between 40-50%. One remaining question: what defines retention rates for iMessage-based apps? |  |
AI Assistant Consumer Travel Report This report tested five AI assistants on booking travel: Instinct, Muse, GrokBot, Dots and Miso. Each was scored on eight areas, from booking time and seat selection to cancellation and rebooking. All five booked a flight, but only some could change one afterward. Miso won the battle, with Instinct coming in at a close second. Grok Bot, Dots & Muse struggled in their own ways while being painfully slow. |  |
AI Assistant Competition Updates
Amazon launched Bee, a hardware first AI-assistant that leans into the ambient assistant experience.
Hark added Action Buttons to help you cleanly kick off tasks based on what it knows from you.
Hark gave away $1 million of free pizza across the US, ordered by its agent. A bug charged some users full price and users complained about privacy policies.
GrokBot added new connectors to Robinhood, Coinbase, Trello, PostHog, beehiiv, eToro, and more.
Pally now let’s you manage your X DMs straight from iMessage.
Caddy built a full interface within the iMessage experience.
Manus added scheduled automations, letting you put tasks on autopilot.
The Agentic Economy
Elon Musk: He hit back at Amazon after reports that it's blocking Grok's shopping agents. He floated the idea of building a company to compete against Amazon in this world of agentic commerce. |  |
Shopify's Tobi Lütke: He introduced shop.md, a plain file that tells AI agents what a store sells and how they can buy from it. |  |
JPMorgan (via CNBC): America's biggest bank has officially blocked companies like Instinct and Muse from accessing Chase accounts via browser-use. “We’re not going to allow [it]…it’s just too risky for clients and for JPMorgan.” |  |
Google: Google launched Universal Cart in Search and the Gemini app, letting people check out across many stores in one cart, which is the same kind of buying an agent would do for you. |  |
Agents in the Wild
Notion's Akshay Kothari built a "context vault" in Notion that every agent he uses reads from and writes new memories back to.
An agent tracked down a sold-out iPhone 18 Pro Max by emailing stores until it found one
An agent got a user $500 back for a delayed flight
One user used an Assistant to track her son’s flight to surprise him and pick him up at the airport.
An agent saved a user over $1,300 after finding numerous unused subscriptions.
Prompt of the Week
On Deck
SF AI Assistant Meetup: October 19th If you are in SF, come by our AI assistant meetup tonight! We’ll have 10 different AI assistant companies presenting, with some fun surprises to be announced at the event. You won’t want to miss it! |  |