events

An AI Agent Bought a Ticket to B2B Finance Expo

Well…uh… it happened. An AI agent bought a ticket all by itself to the B2B Finance Expo in Las Vegas next month in October. The agent was Meta’s Muse. And the prompt was:

“can u buy me a broker ticket to b2b finance expo in vegas in october and just do all the work? i don’t want to deal with anything. plz do it all.”

And then it did it all. All I had to do was click “allow” for my card to be charged. I never even gave it my card info. Whatttt?

Muse hardly knows me. I installed the app on my phone this morning and it asked for my name. I told it the company I work for and my job title in a chat box just like one would converse with any LLM. That was about it. I was pondering a story about agentic commerce and wanted to see how such commerce might work in the future and learned that the future was already happening right this moment. The B2B Finance Expo website had not been programmed to handle AI agents, for example, but that didn’t matter. The agent didn’t care. It went through the whole process on its own without me and checked out. I was floored.

I never went to the event website myself or even looked at it during the process. Instead Muse told me it was buying a Broker ticket for B2B, the price it was paying, and the registrant information it had filled out on its own. It told me that a prompt would appear momentarily to one-tap the purchase. Apparently, I’m signed up already for a service called Link by Stripe, which had all my card info stored so I never had to even give it card info. Ok then…. My only involvement after my prompt was the tap to approve the charge. One tap and that was it, I got an email confirmation that I was attending the conference at the Cosmopolitan on October 20 – 21.

In the real world, attendees might want to make changes after the fact, like changing the name the ticket is under, and that’s often a point of friction. Not here. I told Muse I wanted to change my last name on the ticket from Murray to deBroker and it just figured out how to do it and did it. Uhhh…thanks Muse.

Muse isn’t like other LLMs. Each user is assigned its own Virtual Machine so that Muse pretty much remembers everything from your history.

“Anyone can use it out of the box, no technical experience required,” Meta says of it. “It can handle tasks, like sending an email or booking travel, and it can take on big audacious goals. For tasks that take more time, Muse keeps working after people close the app, and comes back when something changes or when it needs approval, like before it sends an email or makes a purchase.”

In the earlier years of LLMs, there was a race for fintechs to build their own AIs that consumers and borrowers would interact with. Now the balance is shifting to the other side. Instead of people interacting with hundreds of AI chat bots around the web, they may only need to interact with a single one that knows everything about them, has the power to act on their behalf, and is able to navigate any online scenario, even one its never encountered before. Case in point, you could be using Muse to respond to emails, order your groceries, and to even change the name on your ticket to B2B Finance Expo without ever knowing who you were supposed to contact about changing it. The era of agentic commerce is now.