In September, small businesses around the country started receiving strange phone calls. “Hi, this is [Name],” they would begin before informing the recipient they were calling on someone else’s behalf. “I’ll be transcribing this call,” they would disclose, then launch straight into a request: “I’m looking for a quote to install three bidets”. Or: “I’d like to book a karaoke room.” Or: “I’d like to place a cake order for pickup today.” Some businesses simply proceeded, asking follow-up questions about the cake, getting answers, and logging the order. Others were more reluctant to continue. “Are you AI?” asked an employee at a Seattle karaoke place. “I need the real person.” Asked if he could help with the “customer-supplied” bidet job, a Colorado plumber replied with a question of his own, which was automatically transcribed, sort of: “Can you soak my dick?”

The mysterious calls came through Muse, an AI-assistant tool released by Meta last month, which the company says “handles it all” — including online shopping, purchasing flights, making reservations, managing inboxes, and, for some users, booking things over the phone. While internal documents leaked to 404 Media indicate that some of the calls in question may have been joint AI-human enterprises — with a call-center employee taking a handoff from an AI agent before sending the task back again — from the recipients’ side, it didn’t really matter. Suddenly, they weren’t talking directly to their customers anymore.

Early adopters on X have been sharing their experiences with their AI, or AI-ish, executive assistants. “It’s really cool when it works,” wrote one tech YouTuber. “Half the companies hang up on my agent.”

I wanted to hear about this weird new phenomenon from the other side. The Colorado plumber laughed and once again up. The woman at the karaoke place was more patient but sounded confused: Was I AI? Was I selling AI? Could she speak to a real person? No and no, I said, and yes: I was a cold-calling human being who wanted to hear about her experience getting cold-called by bots. (After failing to book a room with Muse, the customer dispatched another agentic solution for the job and claims to have gotten through.) “Ah,” she said. “Okay. We don’t like AI calling our restaurant. We hate it.” End of call.

The fastest way to cement yourself as an absolute weirdo in Europe is by using Instinct. Instinct reached out to my BnB to try to find a cab service in a tiny Belgian town. Cue confusion by the sweet woman at the desk. She then reached out to my French friend who booked the…— Vivek Gopalan (@vvkgopalan) September 13, 2026

The fastest way to cement yourself as an absolute weirdo in Europe is by using Instinct. Instinct reached out to my BnB to try to find a cab service in a tiny Belgian town. Cue confusion by the sweet woman at the desk. She then reached out to my French friend who booked the…

In the parts of the economy where small-business owners are used to taking calls or emails from potential customers, agreeing on prices, and then providing services, these interactions feel novel, odd, and more than a bit antisocial. If the tech industry gets its way, they’re also about to become much more common. Muse, which has been downloaded millions of times, was released after Instinct, an invite-only “personal assistant” that has been “trained to use a phone and a computer,” became a Bay Area sensation valued at $10 billion and a couple of weeks before OpenAI’s Dots, which the company calls “always-on agents built to handle everything.” While agentic plumber booking is the definition of an edge case, businesses and services that are more thoroughly online — restaurants in big cities, concert venues, and tech-hub recreational facilities — have been dealing with more primitive bots for years and are bracing for the coming wave.

The vision is straightforward........

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