| 3. “Agentic commerce” needs to have buy-in from both the consumer and the merchant — and early products suggest that sellers want to maintain control of their platforms. Agents could take on complex financial tasks such as managing consumers’ retirement portfolios or shopping for and comparing retirement policies —which could replace some of the intermediary steps off of which the financial services industry makes money. In a sign that more AI agents are indeed roaming the internet, Adobe found in a survey that AI-driven traffic had surged 393 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier. But there’s evidence to suggest that merchants want to keep control of their relationship with the consumer: For instance, OpenAI killed its Instant Checkout service in March, with the company’s explanation suggesting that it was partly due to limited merchant adoption. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) A report from Forrester Research found that there’s “lukewarm” interest from consumers in having agents make purchases for them — though an AI assistant launched by a start-up called Instinct has garnered some success in Silicon Valley with early tech adopters. Agentic products The launch of Meta’s Muse agent and OpenAI’s agentic AI tools, called “dots,” bring new, wide-ranging capabilities. As OpenAI detailed at its DevDay 2026 two weeks ago, the company’s dot agent has access to its own computer and browser in the cloud — and users can access dots on their phones and computers to assign them tasks. Dots will then perform the tasks even when consumers are offline. “Dots are powered by Astra, our most aligned models, and they have built-in protections and safeguards,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the DevDay keynote. “You can set boundaries on app and computer use, and you can customize instructions for any actions your dot takes.” Separately, Meta launched its Muse agent on Sept. 8, which is similar architecturally to OpenAI’s agentic product but is targeted toward everyday consumers rather than enterprise businesses. (Users can access Muse through WhatsApp, whereas users get access to dots through Slack and Teams.) Mobile downloads of the app have so far totaled around 7 million since the launch, according to data from Sensor Tower. While that number is relatively small, Meta has a significant advantage over other agentic AI offerings in terms of the scale of the social platforms such as Instagram that it’s able to plug into, Dan argues. Indeed, the market reacted positively to Muse’s launch, with Meta jumping 17 percent in the month afterward. In a sign that investors potentially took the launch as a bad omen for the financial industries, the S&P Americas BMI Financial Services Index dropped more than 6 percent over the same period. “In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a Meta Connect event last month, promising that “Muse will make you money.” | 
