There is something wonderfully circular about building an AI agent to remove humans from tedious phone calls and then adding another human to make sure the phone call actually works.

Reuters reports that Meta has been testing a "human concierge" feature for Muse, the personal agent the company launched earlier in September. Contractors can step in to handle certain calls that originate through the service.

Muse was built to do things, not just answer questions

Meta's pitch for Muse is broader than the usual chatbot. The agent can work through a browser, send emails, book travel, fill in forms and take actions on a user's behalf. The company has also introduced the ability to call US businesses.

That makes phone calls an obvious test for agentic AI and an awkward one. Businesses still use different phone systems, menus, procedures and wonderfully unpredictable human conversations.

Meta's current answer, at least during this internal experiment, is to keep an actual person available. The company has enabled the concierge test for a portion of its employees and allows them to opt out.

The privacy question arrives immediately

The funny part lasts right up until the call contains something sensitive. Reuters says some Meta employees have raised concerns that contractors could be exposed to personal information users expected to share with an automated assistant.

Meta says this is one of the reasons for testing the system internally. Spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the company is gathering feedback to build safety and privacy protections before any broader release and would provide appropriate disclosures if the feature reaches users.

That matters because privacy was central to Muse's launch. Meta says the agent runs inside a dedicated secure virtual machine, keeps credentials in protected storage and asks for approval before certain sensitive actions.

A very modern product with a very old fallback

Muse is already becoming a significant consumer product rather than a quiet laboratory experiment. Reuters reports more than 2.5 million downloads shortly after launch, with the app reaching the top of US download charts.

Using human operators during development is not especially exotic. Companies have long relied on human review, annotation and manual fallbacks while automation matures. A complicated phone conversation is also exactly the sort of task where that approach can reveal edge cases quickly.

The comedy comes from the packaging. Meta is presenting Muse as part of a future in which personal AI agents quietly perform work in the background. For now, one of the tools available to that futuristic agent is apparently somebody else picking up the phone.