The Personal Agent Race Is Here | Anish Acharya & David Pawlan
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Why are personal AI agents becoming the next major consumer AI trend?
the general population does not care about being 10% more efficient I have a hot take thesis that this Muse charm is actually less about trying to win the hardware game and it's more about data collection in the real world to fuel Zuckerberg's future metaverse of mapping out the actual world
We were joking internally, like we're days away from an agent messaging someone saying, I noticed you weren't that into her, so I went ahead and broke up with her. There is massive
defensibility around proactivity. I was biking to work, I want to get stuff done, and I just start talking to ChatGPT boys. And throughout my 30-minute bike ride to work, categorized my emails, submitted them to different labels, sent out calendar invites, got to the desk, inbox zero. But it will be a very fine line because if you cross that line once, you lose all trust with your user.
It does feel like there's going to be infrastructure and products that exist only for agent-to-agent interactions that doesn't exist today. What do you think?
It is inevitable that we're going to see personal AI agents have gone from experiment to one of the fastest moving areas in consumer AI. But what would it actually take for one to become part of everyday life? In this episode, A16Z's Anisha Charya sits down with assistant benchmark creator David Pollan, who has been testing dozens of personal agents across everything from email and travel to shopping and financial admin. They discuss why the best agent might be the one you barely notice, proactively handling the tedious parts of life without needing to be managed. They also get into how much autonomy will actually give these systems, whether we'll interact with them through text, voice, apps, or wearables, and where specialized agents could still beat the big general purpose players.
And looking further ahead, they explore what happens when agents start transacting with other agents, reshaping everything from commerce and restaurant reservations to how we spend our time online.
All right, welcome to the A16Z Show. I'm so psyched to be here with my friend, David Paulin. We hung a couple of weeks ago. We're both so enthusiastic about everything that's been happening with personal assistant and consumer AI generally. And man, so much has happened in the last couple of weeks. Maybe to tee it up, I sort of think that there's been a few moments where some part of the ecosystem has sort of seen God. And ChatGPT was a big one, I think, for a lot of folks in November 22 and a bit of 23. It was like, what is this thing that can write emails and poems and start to have a conversation back and forth and feel like you're interacting with a synthetic person? That was, of course, the beginning, the big bang.
The second moment really was coding agents and everything that developers have been obsessed with around sort of quad code and codecs and the ability to trivially create software. And then finally, Most recently with Instinct, Muse, and ChatGPT work, we've had this extraordinary enthusiasm around personal agents and what they can do for us as consumers. So we're here to talk about all things personal agents. We're going to go as deep as we can. We're going to assume that everybody has seen many of the same things that we have seen, and we're going to make this the first in a series of conversations. Welcome, David.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Let's like zoom out and maybe talk about the arc of personal agents over the last few months, the last few weeks. What have you been seeing? What's your sort of view on things?
Yeah, so this space has exploded over the past four weeks. We can roll it back. I was an early adopter of Poke. So I want to say Poke, which was kind of one of the first consumer AI agents to really hit the market. Yes. That launched, I believe it was September 8th. And then I started using it September 11th, three days later. And I remember it so vividly because it was just an unbelievable experience. Their whole gimmick was this negotiation with the agent on how much you're actually going to pay.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are personal AI agents becoming the next major consumer AI trend?
0:00–4:37
2
How does Assistant Benchmark compare personal AI assistants on real-world tasks?
4:37–9:10
3
How can AI agents handle everyday admin and save consumers money?
9:10–14:20
4
Will personal AI agents work best through text, apps, voice, or wearables?
14:20–23:08
5
How can AI agents join group chats without disrupting social interactions?
23:08–29:09
6
How proactive should AI agents be, and what does it take to earn user trust?
29:09–33:39
7
Can specialized personal AI agents outperform general-purpose assistants?
33:39–43:24
8
How will agent-to-agent commerce reshape shopping and online marketplaces?
43:24–51:16
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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