Sierra’s Bret Taylor on Muse, Instinct, and the fight over where AI agents can roam

Good evening.

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Moving on, it was only a matter of time before Amazon started letting some customers shop by texting its Alexa for Shopping agent, as the company announced recently, while continuing to restrict competing agents from accessing its website.

An Amazon employee marveled on LinkedIn that the company went from prototype to launch in just four weeks. Still, personal AI agents like Muse and Instinct had already beaten Amazon to the punch in letting people delegate shopping tasks to AI via text message.

Rival Walmart, meanwhile, began experimenting with shopping by text message five years ago and launched the service more broadly in 2022, but it appears to have quietly disappeared since. Will Walmart and other retailers give it another go?

Lastly, the scandal surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has taken another dramatic turn. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Huang also had an affair with an executive who reports directly to him, while The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia's board is preparing to remove him as CEO. Whatever happens next at Nvidia could have repercussions across the entire AI industry, including for AI labs, tech giants and other companies selling AI technology to retailers.

Now on to the good stuff…

As many of you likely remember, back in September Amazon blocked Meta's Muse personal AI agent from shopping on its website (and apparently eBay has now done the same). Walmart, meanwhile, has taken a more welcoming approach to outside shopping agents, including through its new Agent Gateway.

That contrast illustrates one of the ongoing unresolved questions in this AI era of commerce: Who gets to decide how AI agents interact with businesses, and under what rules?

Meta and Sierra are trying to address that question with Poppy, the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard that they announced last month and are developing with a long list of industry partners including Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and, yes, Walmart.

Poppy is designed to give personal AI agents a standardized way to identify themselves when they arrive at a business's digital door and interact with it on a customer's behalf. The protocol is also meant to give businesses more nuanced control over what those agents can and can't do.

Sierra and its partners say Poppy is complementary to commerce protocols like Google and Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol, which is focused on helping consumers shop through AI experiences, from finding products to making purchases. Poppy is more about how agents identify themselves to a business, and how those businesses implement permissions for those agents.

Sierra co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor brings an interesting perspective to all of this. He’s the former CTO of Facebook and former Salesforce Co-CEO, and currently serves as chairman of OpenAI's board of directors. Of course, Sierra is also at the center of the consumer internet’s AI transformation, helping online retailers, banks, and other large online businesses create their own agents to handle customer service and other customer-facing jobs. The company recently said it had surpassed $400 million in annual recurring revenue, with $150 million being added in the third quarter alone.

I spoke with Taylor recently about how the Poppy protocol came together, the challenge of balancing consumers' freedom to use personal AI agents with businesses' desire for control, and why retailers might still need AI agents of their own even as third-party personal assistants become more capable. The conversation was lightly edited for clarity in some spots and brevity in others.

I hope you enjoy it.