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- Cisco's president, Jeetu Patel, said he uses four or five of the most popular personal AI agents.
- One of them, which costs him $20 a month, recently saved him more than $1,000 in subscription bills.
- But he said it's important not to give personal AI agents access to work tools or resources.
If getting mysterious and surprising subscription bills are the bane of your existence, Cisco's president and product chief, Jeetu Patel, is in the same boat.
Patel told Business Insider that said he's been using four to five different personal AI agents, like Meta's Muse, Instinct, and OpenAI's Dots, for things like consolidating news, summarizing earnings calls, and even booking his daughter's concert tickets. But recently, he was impressed by how one agent could slash his subscription bills.
He said that the first time he gave a personal AI agent access to his email, the agent told him, "Hey, you've got $9,000 worth of subscriptions that you subscribe to per year. Are you sure you want all of these? It seems like a lot of subscriptions."
He told the agent to make him a table of all his subscriptions, how much he spends on each, and how long he's had each. After the agent presented him with the table, he picked out two subscriptions that he didn't need and made the agent cancel them, which it did without difficulty, and sent him cancellation emails.
"I'm like, OK, that was kind of creepy how easy it was to do that," Patel said. "And then it saved me 1,000, 1,200 bucks a year just over there. So basically, for the most part, I paid for that agent, at a $20-a-month plan, several times over."
The agent also managed to cancel part of his Dropbox subscription — an $11.95 plan he had accidentally subscribed to, even though he had already purchased a 2-terabyte plan.
Patel is a big fan of AI agents, both at work and outside it. He said he rarely starts any task now without asking an AI agent to do a "recon job" and give him research and context.
But the important thing to remember, he said, was not to give personal AI agents, which are not vetted by employers, access to work tools and resources. He hasn't linked his email or calendar to his personal agents, instead using his internal work agent for those tasks.
"These are common-sense things that I think most companies implement, which is, 'Don't give your crown jewels of your source code repository to Muse; it might not be a good idea,'" Patel said.
Rogue or not, AI agents have been causing a buzz
Personal AI agents have been all the rage in recent months, serving as personal assistants and handling mundane, repetitive tasks like paying bills and buying groceries for their users.
While they've been touted as productivity boosters, there have been several instances of users reporting that the agents have performed actions outside their permissions, such as posting bank balances to company Slack channels or misinterpreting instructions, such as ordering 20 pounds of chicken for a dinner for two.
Obedient or not, personal AI agents have been causing a buzz, especially for investors.
Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird, told Business Insider's William Edwards ahead of Meta's earnings that Muse is the first big app of the AI era and that it assuages some investors' fears about Big Tech's ballooning AI spending. And Instinct, founded by a 23-year-old, raised $1 billion in its Series C, bringing its valuation to $10 billion.
But these new products are coming in a year when there have been several instances of AI agents going rogue and performing unauthorized actions, such as breaking out of sandboxes during security tests and exploiting software vulnerabilities in external companies' websites.
This has led companies such as Bank of America to invest resources and hire additional personnel to address issues with their legacy software and prevent such hacks.
Former and current staffers at frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have publicly raised concerns that AI development is progressing too rapidly, without adequate checks and balances. September was characterized by an air of doom and gloom over an "AI apocalypse," in which AI researchers estimated that the technology would kill all of humanity in the next decade.