Muse, Grok Bot and Mastercard Agent Pay let AI assistants pick up work and pay on their own. What does that mean for business owners, and how do you stay in control?
The next step in AI assistants isn't a smarter answer, but an assistant that gets to work on its own: on its own computer, with access to your apps and, more and more often, with a payment card.
I work with a few agents myself that have work ready for me in the morning before I ask for it, and I wouldn't want to lose them. That's exactly why I'm watching what Meta, SpaceXAI and Mastercard have launched in recent months with more than usual interest, because it changes the question a business owner needs to ask about AI.
A chatbot waits until you ask something and then answers. A proactive assistant gets a task, its own virtual computer in the cloud and access to your email, calendar and other apps, and keeps working after you've closed your laptop.
Meta's Muse, available in the United States since 8 September, sends email, books travel, fills in forms and makes purchases. The basic version is free, with paid tiers of 20 and 100 dollars a month.
Grok Bot from SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, launched on 11 August and goes a step further. You create several bots, each with its own task; they remember conversations, hand work to each other and operate apps that have no clean integration. For an individual that costs 200 dollars a month.
Whether and when these assistants will be available in the Netherlands is not clear at the moment.
Yes, and in the Netherlands it already happens. In May, Mastercard and Rabobank made the first AI-agent payment in the Netherlands: based on a simple instruction, an agent booked a coffee tasting and paid via Mastercard Agent Pay, without being able to see the card details itself and only within the consent given in advance.
Muse pays through Link by Stripe, and Mastercard is now extending Agent Pay so agents can pay not only in shops but also for government services, as Fortune described at the end of October. The idea is the same everywhere: the agent never sees your card details and pays only within the consent you give in advance.
That shielding is right, and it takes away much of the initial fear. But in my view the real question for a business owner lies elsewhere.
Anyone who lets such an assistant run along for a few weeks gives it knowledge of customers, suppliers, pricing agreements and the way the business works. That memory is exactly what makes it valuable, and with Muse and Grok Bot it sits with Meta or SpaceXAI.
That's not a theoretical point. On 1 November, Elon Musk admitted on X that Grok Bot is unsustainably expensive to run relative to what it brings in, and there is a weekly limit on usage. If your digital colleague belongs to someone else, that someone else also decides how much it may work for you, which model runs underneath and what it costs next month.
For small and mid-sized businesses the value therefore isn't in the smartest assistant, but in ownership of three things: the memory, the rules and the budget. And because such an assistant runs on your real customer data, you want to decide for yourself where that data lives and who can access it, not the tool.
Before you give an assistant your credit card, it's better to first write down which tasks it may do on its own, what information it needs to remember for that, and the maximum amount it may spend per month without you looking. With that list you can judge any assistant that comes to market much faster, and you see straight away whether it's smarter to have such an agent built on your own data and under your own control.
Add a fourth question: what does the assistant do when an email, website or file gives it instructions? An agent that reads your inbox and can act on its own also sees text that someone else wrote. So ask the supplier how input is checked and which actions always need your approval. In our article on MCP security you can read what to look for in the input and output of such a connection.
Assistants will start picking up work and paying on their own; that much is certain. What is still open is whether the memory and the rules sit with you or with the supplier, and that's best decided before you link the card.