Humans are still doing the work behind some AI agents

Various examples of avatars for Muse, Meta's AI Agent, during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026.

Minh Connors | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The next time someone's supercharged AI agent attempts to make a phone call to negotiate a cable bill, it could be an actual human who haggles with customer service rather than the software.

That's because AI agents, powered by the bleeding-edge foundation models developed by companies like Meta and OpenAI, still can't reliably take actions across the web, particularly those involving phone calls. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who now helms agent startup Dazzle AI, says current top-tier AI models excel at surfacing online home renovation services for consumers, but might blow it when they need to book and schedule a rooftop upgrade.

"We're relying on the frontier models to give us good suggestions and a good candidate list, but we're checking that over to make sure that we're really delivering the type of service that we can stand behind," Mayer said, referring to how Dazzle funnels certain tasks to human contractors.

Digital assistants driven by artificial intelligence are currently gaining renewed interest thanks to Meta, OpenAI and others that are pitching the technology as capable of tasks like scouting the internet for shoes.

Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and a host of other agents can accomplish a multitude of web-browsing feats, but it's still early days for the technology, and it often hits digital roadblocks. Those barriers typically involve tasks that would have an AI agent make a phone call, schedule a doctor's appointment on someone's behalf, or reserve a couch scrubbing from a local cleaning service, said Meghan Joyce, CEO of digital agent startup Duckbill.

"We work on a model that is not dissimilar from Uber, where we boil tasks down into atomic bite-sized pieces," Joyce said, referencing the ride-hailing company where she previously worked.

Confused agents

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