Meta has released its broad-spectrum AI agent Muse, which does the user’s shopping, handles his email, handles a significant measure of his financials, maintains his calendars, and on and on. Leave aside the security concerns of such a broadly capable AI agent, especially one produced by Meta.

Amazon has blocked it from shopping on Amazon‘s sites.

In addition to selling goods, Amazon‘s shopping site has a large advertising business, and it won’t want to cede any ground to Meta in that space, analysts said. If agents do more shopping for users in the future, that means fewer humans to show ads to, and a potential rethinking of Amazon‘s business model.

It seems to me, though, that most folks shopping via AI agents tell the agents to go buy this sort of thing, not buy this particular thing. Thus, one answer would be to write ads tailored for AI agents as well as human-targeted ads.

Now we’d have robots selling, and advertising, to the robots that are buying stuff. And the ripples ripple. One ripple: humans, in addition to off-loading some of our work onto robots, could now off-load some of the burden of sorting through or ignoring advertisements onto their robots. Indeed, and this is part of Amazon‘s early-stage problem, humans using AI agents already are unburdening themselves of much of the hassle of dealing with advertisements.