Something happened in September that I canât stop thinking about.
Meta launched a personal agent called Muse. You give it your email, your calendar and a card. It books, buys, cancels, negotiates. It passed 5M downloads in three weeks. More than a million people now talk to it every day.
Two weeks later OpenAI launched one. Google has one. A company called Instinct AI, 14 people, runs one entirely over text and just got valued at $10B. Over half of what people use it for is travel. Itâs doing close to a billion dollars of transactions a year and itâs still invite only.
These agents are free, or close to it. Zuck said Meta will take a small cut of the transactions Muse completes, and he expects the businesses to pay it. ChatGPT put ads in and hit a billion dollars a year in under 200 days.
So the agent is free because someone else is paying it. Will expand on this laterâŚ
Picture this: A Tuesday in 2030
You wake up. Your agent worked while you slept.
It moved your Thursday flight because the original got cancelled. It switched your car insurance, youâre paying $31 less a month. It reordered the dog food and the coffee. You didnât ask for any of it. You set this up once, months ago.
It has one question for you. Lisbon next weekend, two hotels: the small one by the river at $340 or the chain by the station at $290. You tap the river one. Done.
You never opened a website. You never saw a logo.
The boring stuff runs itself. Bills, groceries, renewals, flights. The things that say something about you are still yours. The cycling jacket. The red sofa. The present for your mumâs 60th birthday. But even those start with âshow me threeâ, and you pick from three.
And then the moment I keep coming back to. Youâre out of hand wash. You say, âget my usual Aesop.â The agent orders it. No comparison happens. Nobody got to bid for that sale.
And thatâs the whole game, in one sentence.
Three places your brand can end up
If a machine builds the shortlist before a human sees anything, every brand lands in one of three places.
Named. The customer asks for you. The agent obeys.
Compared. The customer describes what they want and the agent picks. âA good project tool for a small team.â âSomewhere to stay in Lisbon.â You might be in the shortlist. You might not. What Iâm confident about is that being in that shortlist will be enormously expensive.
Invisible. The agent canât read you, or youâre not paying whoever runs it, so you never come up.
Compared sounds fine until you remember whoâs paying the agent. And the early research on how these agents choose is not pretty. They favour whatever sits in certain positions on the page. They can be steered by product copy written for machines. They lean towards brands that are already big and known.
Named is the only safe place. And named means something specific. The customer carries you in their head and says you out loud.
Where the brand lives now
This moves where the work of branding happens.
The name has to point at one thing inside the sentence someone would say. "Get my usual Aesop" works because in that sentence Aesop can only mean one company. The word itself doesn't have to be unique. Apple is a fruit. Orange is a colour. We're Pony, and there are plenty of ponies, but "the branding studio Pony" lands on us. What gets lost is a name that describes what you do, or sounds like three other companies in your category. "Cloud Payments" reads as a search, and the agent will pick whichever Cloud Payments is biggest/
The visual identity does its job earlier. At the moment of choice, nobody sees it. The agent shows three lines of text. So the logo, the colour, the tone, all of it has one purpose now: make you memorable enough to be asked for later. It works like a face you recognise.
The website becomes the HQ. Think about Coca-Cola. You know the logo, you could draw it from memory, you know exactly what it tastes like. When did you last visit their website? You buy them in a shop, a bar, a vending machine. The brand lives in your head and the site is just where it lives if you ever need to find it. Thatâs where I think most digital businesses are heading too. Traffic drops. The site stays. Itâs the place that proves youâre real.
Underneath, the site has to be readable by machines. Clear facts, consistent data, nothing hidden in a carousel. From the outside it looks like the same site, a bit plainer. Iâll write about that separately.
So what do you do with your brand
I donât have a tidy answer. I have a question Iâve started asking.
Would someone name us, or describe us?
If theyâd describe us, we get compared. By price. By clients. By timelines. By headcount. Every time.
Getting named needs a few things, and none of them are new. A name that means one thing. A reason to be remembered before youâre needed. Something you stand for that people can repeat in one line. Owning a word in your category, so when the agent hears it, youâre the answer.
Weâve been doing this at Pony for a while, we call it Uncomparison, and I thought it was about taste and positioning. Now thereâs a machine doing the comparing, and it has a billing relationship with your competitors. I didnât expect the idea to get this literal.
Weâve started doing some of this to Pony itself. Rewriting the site so the facts are plain. Checking what comes up when someone asks their agent for a branding studio for fintech in London. Itâs early and I donât know if it works yet.
One honest caveat. Only about one in ten people say theyâd let an agent buy on its own today. The direction is set. The speed, not really.
For a hundred years brands fought for attention. Billboards, feeds, inboxes. The next fight is for one sentence. The one someone says to their agent when theyâre out of hand wash.
Love,
Stef