Meta joins with group of companies to tame ‘chaos’ of doing business with AI bots

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Facebook parent company Meta, takes the stage at the Meta Connect developer conference.

Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

A month after Meta's launch of Muse, the personal agent that quickly turned into a viral sensation, a group of companies is coming together to try to simplify the process of bringing the technology into the business world.

Meta, Walmart, Stripe and a handful of other companies are publishing what they're calling a "personal agent protocol." It's an open standard meant to dictate how artificial intelligence agents can interact with businesses.

Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is part of the group. Taylor, who's also chairman of OpenAI and is leading the initiative, told CNBC in an interview that companies have a lot of work to do to figure out how and when personal agents are able to access information.

"Companies will know when it's a personal agent versus an actual person. For a lot of companies there's a risk: you don't want just a random bot that isn't acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service," Taylor said. “It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists."

Meta's Muse has become the most popular and buzzy versions of personal AI agents since hitting the market in early September. It soared to the top of Apple's App store and remains there, ahead of ChatGPT. However, Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta's agents, citing worries of website scraping.

Amazon also blocked Perplexity's AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging the company took steps to "conceal" its AI agents so they could continue to scrape Amazon's website without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a "bully tactic."

Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the U..S and it's "growing rapidly."

"The whole point of this is to be an open standard," Taylor said.