Silicon Valley’s bet that billions of agents will be out ordering food, booking travel, and filling up their humans’ shopping carts is running into an (admittedly early) reality check.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said Friday that the site was seeing “very, very low numbers” of bookings by Meta’s Muse and Instinct AI agents, while DoorDash has received “maybe several hundred orders in total” from personal AI assistants, CEO Tony Xu said. “The adoption of these horizontal personal agents may be much slower than is anticipated,” Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said.
Either adoption is slow, or much of Silicon Valley is dead wrong in its assumptions about regular people’s behavior (it wouldn’t be the first time). That could validate decisions by big retailers like Amazon to block agents, whose robot eyeballs can’t be monetized the same way humans’ can.
— Jake Angelo
