Tech Firms Race to Put AI in Everyday Tasks

Meta's Muse became the most downloaded phone app after its debut last month, while OpenAI's competing assistant, dots, costs $100 a month. These tools don't just answer questions: they can use a device and web browser to apply for jobs, book restaurant tables and send emails on a user's behalf. The companies are moving software into everyday tasks, with users handing agents more than a question and waiting for an answer.

Who Gets to Act for the User

Brian X. Chen, The New York Times's lead consumer technology writer and author of Tech Fix, tested Muse and dots for two weeks. He said he booked a reservation at one of the country's most difficult restaurants to get into, asked the agents to apply for jobs for his former nanny and had them plan school lunches for his toddler. The tools' reach is practical and intimate: a job application, a meal plan, a hard-to-get table. The source doesn't say whether the nanny wanted an agent to apply for jobs on her behalf.

The distinction from older chatbots is significant in function, not magic. Chatbots primarily answer questions; agents perform more complicated tasks. More than a decade earlier, Amazon, Apple and Google offered virtual assistants that could hail an Uber or order takeout. The technology was slow and clunky, and consumers found it easier to do those tasks themselves. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, announced Wednesday that it was testing a similar agent called Duet.

There is a corporate dispute tangled into this new market. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement involving news content related to AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims. The people using the tools get the interface; the companies and publishers are fighting over the material and systems behind it.

Everyday Life as a Product Demo

Marissa Mayer, former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer, is developing Dazzle through her start-up. Late last year, she used it to help answer a teacher's request for three bullet points about what made her daughter Marielle special before Marielle's 10th birthday. “It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She called the answer perfect.

Dazzle analyzes images in users' camera rolls to answer questions, perform tasks and make suggestions. Mayer said she wants it to handle everyday needs such as buying pants a user photographed or finding a birthday present for a picky spouse. “A lot of what excites me is taking something that used to take you hours or minutes, and now getting it done in seconds,” Mayer told the interviewer at her company's office in Palo Alto last month. That's the promise from the person building the product: everyday life, compressed into seconds and routed through an assistant.

The Hiring Gate Keeps Its Own Rules

At a media lunch in September, Lila Ibrahim, Google DeepMind's chief AI readiness officer, said the company increasingly looks for candidates who demonstrate learning beyond formal education. Degrees still matter for researchers, engineers and other roles, she said, but employers place more weight on additional credentials and experience. “One credential will tell me what you've learned, but multiple credentials tell me that you have a learning mindset,” Ibrahim said. She said graduates now often include more information about learning outside formal education on their résumés and CVs.

Ibrahim said varied learning can help people ask questions, a skill she said schools don't teach well. “You realize that a lot of people in school haven't necessarily been taught how to ask questions, how to ask good questions, and how to really question why.” She added: “Getting answers is super cheap these days, but actually knowing how to ask really good questions is getting harder and harder.” Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has warned that society has a narrow window to prepare for the next stage of AI. He has said STEM and computer science remain important, alongside philosophy, economics and ethics.

Ibrahim said Google DeepMind values interdisciplinary colleagues and that pairing “the neuroscientist, alongside the ethicist, alongside the biologist” had helped with technical breakthroughs. The lab had hired numerous philosophers, she said, adding that “you need to pair them with operators to turn those ideas into action.” Ibrahim became chief AI readiness officer at the beginning of 2026, a role she said she created to address a widening gap between the technology being built and society's readiness to receive it.

That gap has numbers. A study of more than 300 million registered learners on Coursera and Udemy found companies' AI deployment was outpacing workers' skills. Nearly 75% of organizations had deployed or were piloting the technology, but only 18% reported that most of their workforce had participated in AI upskilling or reskilling over the previous year. Fears of AI-related job losses have somewhat eased; workers and human-resources departments still face pressure to develop combinations of human and AI skills. The companies keep deploying. Most workers, by the figures provided, haven't yet received that training.