Illustration by Eliot Wyatt
On September 8, 2026, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent designed to act on a user’s behalf: filling out forms, negotiating, booking travel, and making purchases. Twelve days later, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site, arguing that third-party agents should identify themselves and obtain a retailer’s permission before transacting on behalf of its customers.
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The problem of imitation—which ranges from illegal counterfeit to legal products intentionally designed to mimic another—is becoming more urgent for businesses. Recent figures suggest that both its scale and the channels through which it spreads are expanding rapidly. In the United States, customs authorities seized more than 78 million counterfeit goods in fiscal year 2025, more than twice the number seized a year earlier. Its estimated value had risen nearly 40% to more than $7.4 billion. In the EU, the value of counterfeit goods detained reached a record €3.8 billion, while the value intercepted at the EU border alone almost doubled in a year.
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Somewhere in your company today, an expert rejected a perfectly plausible answer. A controller caught a revenue figure that counted deferred bookings. A security engineer blocked a release that passed every test but would have handed an AI agent write access to the production database. That override, escalation, or reversal is the most valuable data your firm produces. If you record enough of those moments and use them, alongside everything else your firm knows and measures, to train an AI model that learns from each correction, you could, in theory, eliminate the need for managers to route information and coordinate action. In doing so, execution gets turbocharged by automation. You might even be able to eliminate hierarchy altogether.