What happened

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer, says his AI agent buys him tea from some farm in Taiwan or Japan every week. An AI agent is an AI assistant that goes online to look things up, compare prices and place orders for people; the one Wang uses is Muse, Meta’s own agent.

He said it on an episode of the podcast Cheeky Pint released on 12 October, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also on the show. When the host asked the two of them for their favourite ways to use Muse, Wang said his Muse keeps sourcing “increasingly obscure teas from increasingly obscure vendors of tea”. By now, he said, “on a weekly basis, my Muse is buying some random tea from some farm in Taiwan or some farm in Japan”. Which farm, which tea and how much it cost, he didn’t say.

Later in the episode, when the talk turned to agents buying things for people, Zuckerberg made a different point. He had rarely used Instacart, the US grocery delivery service, but he set up an account specifically so Muse could order cooking ingredients for him, and now uses it once or twice a week; without Muse, he said, he wouldn’t have become a new Instacart customer at all. So he asked: “is that Instacart account really for me, or is it for the Muse?” As he sees it, it won’t just be people any more; agents are effectively going to have accounts too. This stretch of the conversation began with whether businesses should let agents in or try to block them, and Zuckerberg went on to say that anyone who sits this out “is going to end up feeling sad over time”.

According to tech press reports, as of 18 October the Muse agent app is available only in the US and Canada, and can’t be used in Taiwan. Wang is one of Meta’s own senior executives; whether ordinary users can buy across borders the way he does didn’t come up in the episode, and we couldn’t find any official word on it.

Why it matters to you

What stood out most to us in Wang’s answer is the phrase “increasingly obscure vendors”. Taken at face value, his agent keeps digging further into sellers hardly anyone has heard of. In the same episode, Wang also said people are now fully delegating purchases to agents; for users, one part of the appeal is less hassle: no clicking through a pile of websites and doing all the research yourself, and the agent applies your criteria for you. Say “I need something by Wednesday”, and the agent will only look for things that can reach you by Wednesday.

The one placing an order isn’t necessarily a person any more. So how does an agent find a shop? Zuckerberg said on the show that Muse has been trained to be very good at using a web browser, so businesses don’t have to set anything up for it; it can go onto their websites and get things done by itself. How it decides which shop to pick, though, we couldn’t find Meta explaining anywhere public, so what follows is our reading: however far an agent digs, it can only choose from shops it can find and make sense of online. A little-known shop has a chance of being picked, provided the agent can work out what you sell, whether you can ship to the customer and how long it takes; a shop it can’t make sense of doesn’t even get compared.

Say you run a tea shop in Lugu, Nantou, selling oolong from your own tea farm, and you have long-standing customers in the US and Canada who order through your website; those two countries are where, according to the reports above, Muse is already available. Suppose one day a customer there tells their agent: “Find an oolong sold directly by a tea farm in Taiwan, delivered by next Wednesday.” The agent opens tea shops’ websites one by one and reads them. Your site tells the story of your tea farm in full, but on overseas shipping all it says is “Message us to ask”. A customer browsing for themselves would send you a message; an agent reading that line can’t be sure the tea would arrive by Wednesday, and if a shop next to yours spells it out clearly, that’s the one most likely to get picked.

What to do about it

It’s time to act, and there’s no need to wait for Muse to reach Taiwan. Customers in Taiwan can’t use Muse yet, but they can already ask ChatGPT to find them a shop; according to OpenAI, when a question would benefit from up-to-date information, ChatGPT searches the web on its own before answering. As we read it, what ChatGPT reads online is the same material an agent reads when it picks a shop: your website, and what other people write about you. Get that material in order today, and ChatGPT can read it today; when an agent comes to pick a shop for a customer one day, it will be working from the same thing.

Whether an agent would pick you, though, isn’t something you can test yet. According to the reports above, Muse isn’t available in Taiwan, and we couldn’t find an official way to use it here, so you can’t even install it and try it once. Zuckerberg’s Instacart account is in his name, yet the one using it to buy things is Muse; apply that to a tea shop, and the order carries the customer’s name while the one who picked you may have been an agent, which you couldn’t tell from the order. Take it one step further: when an agent doesn’t pick you, it probably won’t message you about shipping costs the way a customer would, either; it reads, compares and moves on. If it looks at you and then doesn’t choose you, you won’t know.

You can’t see the agent’s side, but you can see ChatGPT’s: when a customer asks it to find a shop, who it recommends and what it writes about you are right there in the answer. Whether you’re in that answer, and whether it gets you right, comes down to the material it reads. If you bring us in for managed GEO, our team fixes your site’s content, makes sure what other sites say about you matches up, and regularly checks how each AI engine describes you; you just review the results. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation; the “engines” here are AI such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, which write answers of their own.

The demo is a session with one of our consultants where they show you live, and it covers two things. The first is ChatGPT answering a request that comes with conditions: the customer in the US told their agent “a tea farm in Taiwan selling direct, delivered by next Wednesday”; in the demo, the conditions become the ones your own customers would set. Which places ChatGPT lists, and what it writes when it mentions you, you’ll see on screen. The second is the GEO audit: geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas. The results also include a separate item, Agent Friendliness, which looks at whether your website has left notes that AI agents can make sense of. When your customers ask ChatGPT to find a shop, whether you’re on its list is something you’ll know once we’ve gone through the answers together in a demo.

Further reading