Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. For free today at odu.com/box, that's oduo.com/box. I'm Aina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by chef Paul Carmichael. We talk all about the incredible restaurants he's worked in, the best music to play in the restaurant bathrooms, and how he reacted when he found out his restaurant Cabawa had been ranked number one by the New York Times. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers. There are days where so much needs to get done. I daydream about having a clone of myself. Having bills, renewing my driver's license, keeping up with doctor's appointments, planning meals, and that doesn't even begin to touch my job or my social life. Silicon Valley says it has a fix for this kind of mental overload. They don't want to clone us, at least not yet, but they do think they have the next best thing. I'm John Quinhill, and this week on Explanation Me from Vox, What You Game, and What You Give Up, When You Let AI Agents Take the Reigns. So what is an AI agent, exactly? Essentially one way to think about this is agents are the next evolution of chatbots. Reese Rogers is a senior reporter at Wired, where he covers software, and he's been testing out some different AI agents, also known as agent to AI. So when you're thinking about an agent, I'd create this mental model of some tiny digital assistant that's constantly searching the web, going through your email, and checking your calendar, trying to find ways it could proactively be helpful for you. So where a chatbot was more turn-based, right? You asked a question, and then the AI generated an answer, agents are more proactive. This is scanning your email 24/7, and sending you a message may be highlighting a potential calendar conflict. Okay, what agents are out there right now? I mean, something new is always out, but what's the landscape looking like right now? Yeah, so at the start of this year, there was a tool called OpenClaw that really sparked this with early adopters in San Francisco. But now there are much more consumer-friendly versions, with one of the most notable being Meta's Muse. Launched about a month ago, that agent now has millions of users. So it's grown quite popular, but there's also a tool from OpenAI called Dots. But where Meta Muse is free to download, OpenAI's Dots is still behind a hundred-dollar-a-month paywall. So that's really-- That's a lot of money. That one for now is for power users, but Meta Muse is kind of the entryway that a lot of people are experimenting with agents right now. One personal example to share something that I've actually been using agents for is our couches broken. And finding a new couch has been a pain. We want a sleeper bed, but we want these specific colors. We have this specific budget. I want something maybe on sale. I love a good deal. So I've been using Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots to try to find a few different options for us. And one interesting thing is Meta's Muse is connected to Facebook Marketplace. So there's these really good integrations where I can give it all these details. And it found a few good couches that are only maybe a couple blocks from me. But also, I really enjoyed OpenAI's Dots experience as well for this. I spent about an hour talking to it on the phone. And the AI agent made a packet of all these different options I could find. And just this morning, it flagged that one of them is now 40% off. So I texted my husband. I was like, "Alright, I think we found our couch." Most people are using this as part of maybe a workflow. So that would be I attach it to my email. I attach it to my calendar. And I'm using it kind of as a personal assistant to kind of organize my life. But people have been quite creative. One of the breakout uses for Meta's Muse is people have been connecting their bank account statements and then using it to scan for subscriptions they might want to cancel. So it can be used in many different ways. Though I will say I do not connect it to my own bank account for a myriad of reasons. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. The idea of giving any third-party access to my bank information, it does not thrill me. I don't love that concept. Yeah. And that's one of my biggest concerns about these AI agents is how much personal information we're handing over to these large companies when I tested Meta's Muse. It wanted access to my emails. Every morning, Muse can review your inbox, surfaced unanswered emails, and draft responses for you to review. My bank account, I gave Muse read-only access to my bank statements. Even my passport expiration details it asked for, it asked permission first. And the pitch is convenient, right? AI agent helps you get things done across every part of your life. But Muse users are automatically opted in to having all of their interactions with Muse. Muse to train Meta's AI models. So I would definitely recommend if you're sharing personal details, go into the settings and turn that off. Because you might be handing over even more information about yourself than you initially realize. Yeah, what is the privacy situation with all of this? Like, I don't know. We all have various apps where we don't read and click, I agree. But this feels, I don't know, a little more, it could be a little more invasive. Yeah, especially because it's all about automation. So if you're automating things and you have access to all of your data, it could make mistakes. And in various user ways, you might not even be thinking about. There was this one really interesting story of someone who had connected an AI agent to their work slack, in addition to their bank account. And their agent just automatically posted how much money was in their checking account for all of their co-workers to see. Oh no, oh no, I would be mortified. I would need a new job. So there's these kind of mistakes, right, that these AI tools can still make. So if you're interested in experimenting with them, I would just be really thoughtful with how you're setting up these tools, as well as what kind of information you feel comfortable sharing. How are these AI agents being marketed? I mean, AI is not popular right now, just ask any politician who has a data center coming to their state, people are not loving it. How are they trying to sell this to the average person? Yeah, the AI backlash really is out of fever pitch right now. And you could almost see that in the way that AI companies are trying to market these tools, they've really, really leaned into cuteness, into adorable mascots. So whether it is muse, if you haven't seen its agent, it's worth looking up a photo of the mascot. It looks like a mix between like a La Boo Boo and an Ewok. It's like very furry, very cuddly, very cute. Hello everyone, I'm Agrippa, and I'm here to brainstorm and get things done with you. What should we build? And opening AI schools also have similar kind of like blobs that with like large eyes, you know, that might be a little interior. Hey, I'm your dot. I'm new in chat GBT. I'll be here to handle everything that comes her way. Ready to jump in when you need me. So I feel like companies are hearing this kind of feedback that people aren't trusting AI right now. Or maybe they have moral or ethical reasons they don't want to use these tools. And you can see in the marketing that these companies are trying to find some way to entice new users. Do you think AI agents are ultimately going to kind of, I don't know, worm their way into our lives despite how unpopular AI companies are? I do think so. I would not be surprised if my mom had an agent on her phone now because it does feel like it's breaking through to average people in the way that chat should be tea had a moment a few years ago. So even though there's a lot of distrust for large companies like META, I think there are some appealing parts of this that will bring in millions of people. So I do see this as the future of the internet. You know, when I. think of the dream of, I don't know, the average person working in AI in Silicon Valley. It's okay. We're going to use AI. It's going to free up the free time of so many people work is going to get done faster. You're going to have more leisure time. Has that been the case for the people you've spoken with who are using this? Has it given them more free time to enjoy themselves or has it done something else? You would think so, right? You would think that if people are automating these kind of boring aspects of their life that they would have more time to go touch grass, go see a movie, have some fun, but it does feel like that time just gets filled with other work, other productivity measures. So while it may be able to take some more annoying or tedious things off of your plate, I am not as optimistic that it's going to give us this utopia freedom where I'm always at the beach. Coming up, AI Agents, at home. Support for today's playing comes from Fetch, Pent Insurance. Here's something that might surprise you if you don't listen to the show all the time, but if you have listened to the show very lowly, you've probably heard it before because I've said it before. Every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars according to one study. Be prepared with Fetch, Pent Insurance. Fetch is the most complete coverage for dogs and cats, according to Consumer Advocate. 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[email protected]/save. Support for the show comes from a way fair. Sure, you want your home to be stylish, but more importantly, you want to feel like your space, not an influencer's mood board filled with weird blob furniture that won't age well. Shots fired way fair. No matter what your personal style is, chances are way fairer can help you find items to match. Even if it's blob-like, there you go, come on, shut up to the blobs. We don't judge, says way fairer. And way fairer won't either. Oh no, we don't judge as me saying that. I don't judge and way fairer won't either, except I do judge. They can help you create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. In fact, you can trust your getting quality with way fairer verified. Ideas are hand-bedded by product specialists using a 10 point quality inspection. Forget the other quality inspections. Whatever you're looking for, you can use filters and review customer photos from more than 20 million verified buy-up star reviews. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with way fairer awards. Join way fairer awards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's w-a-y-f-a-i-r.com. I'm JQ, back with more explaining to me. My name is Saria Zoot. I'm a mom of three living in Miami. Work and tech. I've been building creative tech software for 15-ish years. And most of the people in my community always saw me as like, oh, she has some like weird tech stuff. But the AI agents stop as the first time that we're like, let's call our friends. She knows she's saving our lives. Sarie's an early adopter when it comes to tech. So when she got an invite to try an AI agent, she was curious how it might help with the time-consuming, stress-inducing job of being a mom. I mean, you know, they say like that as a mom, you should like being is more important than doing. But there's just so much doing, right? Like, you, you know, wake up and I have to do like meal coordination and get my kids out for breakfast. They have different schools, coordinate carpools, arrange their schedules for the next day. And then, you know, a lot of work during the day, but there's the email from the teacher. There's the 20 group chats asking you for, you know, do you want to participate in this group gift? You know, a birthday invite. So it's like the constant interruption, I mean, they don't call it the invisible load for no reason. I'm a full-time working mom, I'm spending like eight or nine hours in this office, but I would say two or so hours a day, I'm interrupted for some reason related to running the household. Her AI agent's first test came at the start of the school year. A mom sent me like, hey, did you buy school supplies for the kids yet? And I'm like, I didn't even know we had to. She sends me a three page PDF of all the school supplies you have to buy. And I sort of basically like shared the PDF with instinct, which is on WhatsApp. It comparison shopped and got everything shipped to her home in time. She was hooked. And then I remember that night coming home, just like feeling so calm and reading my son a book and feeling present and I was like, wow, I actually was very cynical about something that is giving me more time for living. Sarah is one of several moms I've seen online saying, actually, AI agents have been a big help at home. I basically am not as scared of the little grunt mark stuff because I know I can offload it. The birthday invite comes in and you have to sign the waiver for the kids party. And it's like, oh, my God, I have to go into this interface and 10 minutes of clicking buttons. And now it's like, great. AI agent can do that. My energy is like intact or the school teacher sends an email like, hey, please send family photos by Thursday. And I'm like, I would love to. But I'm also extremely busy to go to Walgreens right now and print out these photos. And now it's like, okay, let me send the photos to my agent on WhatsApp and they get printed. And I either just like quickly pick them up where they get delivered to my doorstep. And so people complain about AI, but to me, like the old way is like an anti-human way to live. Yeah, I mean, I just find that like life's too short to be like manually filing insurance claims and like being on hold waiting for like the lab tests at the, you know, that the doctor did. Like, I don't know. I feel like it's allowing me to show up in ways that I've always wished I could show up. I just am so strapped for time. Yeah, does your life feel meaningfully different because you're using this interface because you're getting things done using this? I sort of feel less burdened by the invisible load, meaning like I feel like I have my friends actually describe instinct as the wife they never had, my mom friends. I read that and I remember like talking to the married women in my life about it. My friends who have already started their families and I was like, but yeah, doesn't your husband or doesn't your partner don't they get it and the way they look at me, they're like, oh, you sweet summer child. You have no idea. You got to get it done. And I'm like, really? I thought that was what the part, but like every mom I know is like, no, no, I'm doing it. And my husband uses it a lot. We have a, you know, a division of labor of sorts, something gets damaged in the house, like the AC. He fixes that. So like he's used instinct for like repairs and things, but you know, the like I have three kids, the amount of like schoolwork that I'm on top of. My son is ADHD. I now have instinct log into his school portal every day and send me a download of all the homework he has. What he needs to submit. So instead of me being annoyed and frustrated every night, I just have like a little checklist and I just check in with him. Did you do this for that? And so it's the little things. I mean, my husband is using it for different things, but I mean, they don't call it the invisible load for no reason. Does it free you up for the living more though? Because I think something that can happen, something that does happen is it's freed up time and then people are like, well, more work to do or does it actually for you up to say? Yeah. All right. You guys, everyone had a great week this week. I saw that the homework's been checked. Let's get ice cream. Yeah. Totally. You know, it's funny. I do think there's something fundamentally very human about as more tech has introduced, the bar just gets raised. So you would have thought that when the dishwasher was introduced that women would spend less time in the kitchen, but turns out the bar is higher. You can now host. And so, you know, do you have a pretty table set up? And so that's sort of been like the, I think, the history of this stuff. But I will say one of the surprising discoveries I've had with this stuff is how pro-social it is. So I'll give you an example. I was in New York last week. I lived in New York for many years before I moved to Miami and I have my college roommate still lives there. But I went to New York for work and I was very busy and I texted my friend when I landed and I'm like, I'm in New York. I don't know.
know if I'll have time, but maybe we can catch up over coffee. My friend is also on Instinct, an Instinct has something called the Trusted Person Network, so it's basically a way for us to coordinate together. Through my agent, my friend basically booked us with our calendars an hour, and we ended up meeting in the West Village for brunch. I feel like people are so negative about this technology, and to me, it's like, if we bring the right consciousness to it, it actually can free us and give us more time to be more human. I wonder how do you pick and choose what to use it for, because I imagine there are some things where it's like, yeah, this is friction, but it's friction I enjoy. One of the things I loved about growing up, my mom and I, we both love entertaining. We both love hosting. We both love decorating, and so it was like, okay, 18th birthday party. We're having a dinner party. We're going to put the menu together, and we're picking each individual thing, and you know, we could nowadays offload that to an AI agent, but I don't know, sometimes it's fun to pick the plates in the napkin. Totally. Totally. I think the line is different for everybody. For example, I love buying Halloween costumes with my kids. It's a tradition we have, it's like an experience for us. So for me, that's not something I personally want to use AI for, but, you know, I think everyone draws out line differently, and I think we have to give people more credit. It's not just stressed out moms turning to AI. There's a chance that your next coworker might be agentic. It's next. Support for the show today comes from Monarch, and before you get the butterflies, just so you know, this is about paying off debt. Sometimes paying off debt can feel like a never ending journey, no matter how many payments you make. You know we're close to the finish line, but Monarch wants to help you make a clear timeline that lets you finally see the end, and lets you breathe a little easier. Monarch's debt pay down simulator and visualizer shows your exact debt-free date based on your real balances and payments. You can pay out your options and pick the fastest one that makes the most sense for you. Find your own money story with Monarch. I like Monarch's debt-free time, but Monarch's debt-free time is still a bit different. Monarch's debt is a little more than a second-day. Monarch's debt pay down simulator shows your exact debt-free time. I have a current experience with AI agents that is training for my job and, boy oh boy, I hate it. It's trash and it's really condescending and terrible. My firm just started using Clawed and I would say that it makes our jobs a lot harder. It is fantastic at finding small code bugs that would have destroyed my data and it has been very useful at sketching out plans. We're back with more explain it to me. I'm JQ. I'm Kate Taylor and I am a senior writer at Wired. Okay, AI, we've been using it on the job for a while now, but recently you wrote a piece called AI agents are about to flood the workforce. No one's really ready for it. What should we be expecting? How is this different from what's been going on? I think that the biggest change for AI in the workforce now is the idea of AI agents and kind of what their capabilities are. I think especially in the last year to last couple of months, even with agents kind of being seen as more autonomous, the shift has been like, okay, it's not just you're going to use AI as a tool. It's like AI is going to be your coworker, AI is kind of your chief of staff. So this interesting thing of AI, not being like, oh, it's going to take your job, but AI, it is actually working alongside you. What does an AI agent at work do? It's kind of like AI can do anything where I talk to people who are embedding it on all of these different teams. I think one of the most common ones is AI as executive assistants or a chief of staff where it's managing your email. It's setting up your meetings, but people are using AI agents on engineering teams. They're using AI agents on sales teams like where it's something where, oh, I need to email a bunch of people and try and get them to use my product. Now AI is doing that where you have an agent who is kind of autonomously writing the emails or spying the emails, setting up first meetings. It's a very, very broad understanding of what agents can be used for now. I think that's interesting, this idea of AI as executive assistant as chief of staff. That used to be the role of a person or these tools going to become our actual coworkers. Am I going to have to explain to my parents, like, when I'm talking about this thing that happened to work or this thing that happened at work, it's like, no, sorry, that wasn't a person. That was an AI agent. That was not a human being I was talking about. When I was working on this article, I got kind of obsessed with the idea of AI as your coworker and like what it means to be a good coworker. What you want in a coworker is someone who's like a good hang. It's not necessarily someone who's super productive. So that's something I'm really interested in where it's like, oh my god, if my coworkers are just these agents who are kind of just like not fun to work with, not a good hang. Is that actually helpful? Hey, how was your weekend? Great. I worked 24/7 and got so much accomplished. Oh, okay. Cool. But it is interesting where it's now these agents are kind of embedded into Slack, they're in your email. You're talking to them like you would talk to an actual coworker who just isn't in the same office as you. I think that's so interesting because I do value the relationship I have with my coworkers, Kelly, who's producing this. Like once a week when we're in office, we have Biscotti time where we go to a coffee shop nearby and we have Biscotti and it's like one of the best parts of the work week. Are people building emotional connections with the agents they're using at work the same way they would with coworkers? I think people are starting to build not exactly a human-to-human relationship with their AI coworkers, but it's definitely more than you would with like a tool. Like, oh, I'm not going to chat with Google Sheets about like, oh, nice job on that. Thank you. Like, it is definitely moving in a direction where I talked to one founder who was saying she would get slacks from people on her engineering team and they'd be like, oh, yeah, Kayla helped us out on this and Kayla is an AI agent. I think that people dating chat bots have shown that people can form these deep connections with AI and like, I personally, this is a story I am bracing forward in the next year is like people having emotional affairs with their AI co-workers. I was going to say people meet their little booze at work and like, oh, no, you're not going to meet your little boo at work because the only option you have for a little boo at work is an AI chat bot. Genuinely, I am stealing for this where I think it's kind of inevitable. I love you. If people are literally seeking out AI as a romantic partner, like why wouldn't AI, that's their coworker, have that similar kind of relationship? I think that the biggest thing that AI still can't do in my experience at least is it doesn't have the spontaneity. It doesn't have kind of the unexpected element of human relationship. So we don't know what's going to happen. I've heard people complain in the past that their bosses are demanding that they use AI to the point that it can feel like their use is performative rather than actually helpful. I think it's this idea that rather than having a problem and using AI to solve for it, you think, I have this tool to fix things. Let me retroactively find the problem. Are these tools starting to be helpful? Again and again, we see more senior executives are much more excited about AI than middle managers or the people who actually work with AI day in and day out. So I think that part of that gap is worrisome. I mean, McKinsey has found that looking for actual enterprise-wide return on investment, like the vast majorities of companies that have deployed AI are not seeing any real financial difference. Individual people might be
more efficient, but the entire company has a whole like they are not making more money or saving money. There's no evidence of that happening at the vast majority of companies using AI so far. So I don't have to worry about, I don't know, this time next year is explain it to me going to be hosted by an AI agent. I hope not. I'm Junklin Hill and this is explain it to me from box. I hope not and like that's something where I think that AI is good at summarizing things. I think it's good at kind of doing research, but I don't think it's particularly good at having like an interest in conversation with someone. Like so no, I do not think AI is coming for your job definitely. That's it for this week. Special thanks to Lane Brown. We want your help with an upcoming show about our own intelligence. What does being intelligent mean to you? How should we measure it? Do we overvalue it? Tell us what you think. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot an email to
[email protected]. If you like listening to the show, consider becoming a vox member. It's the best way to support us and comes with a ton of cool perks. Head over to vox.com/members to learn more. This episode was produced by Kelly Westinger. It was edited by Avshy Artzi, fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Richard Duncan, our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, Junklin Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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