Episode 24: Every Big Tech Company Now Has an Agent

Agents are arriving faster than anyone can keep up with. In this LinkedIn Live, recorded on 22 October 2026, Holly Joint and Ewan MacLeod run through the agentic tools they have been obsessing over, from Meta’s big move to Anthropic’s announcement from the previous 24 hours, and ask what it all means for the rest of us.

Ewan starts with Meta’s Muse. His argument is about scale: Meta has pivoted away from Llama, now says its own models are frontier-class, and is giving every user a small computer of their own on which an agent can act for them. Holly presses on why the market reacted when Meta AI has sat on a billion phones with little impact, and the answer is the shift from a chatbot to something that gets things done.

From there it is a quick tour: Instinct, the invite-only agent that caused a stir; OpenAI’s Dot, which Ewan lost access to when he flew home to the UK; Grok’s agent, powerful but hungry for tokens; and Anthropic’s Duet, an always-on Claude in research preview. Then the hosts explain the platform they have built themselves, Lumen, with its Workbench interface: portable memory, your own data, and the ability to swap the model underneath.

The live audience steers the second half. Tarek asks about agentic payments and banking, and Ewan says the next interface for banking is an API an agent can use, pointing to Danske Bank’s announcement this week. Daniel raises people outsourcing their thinking to sycophantic chatbots, and the conversation moves to skills fading, whether your AI should challenge you, and what a chief of staff is really for.

Key Topics

• Meta Muse and why the market took notice
• Instinct, Dot and Grok: the new wave of personal agents
• Anthropic’s Duet and always-on Claude
• Lumen: building your own agent platform
• Agents as the next interface for banking
• Outsourcing thinking and the risk of sycophantic AI
• Should your AI challenge you?
• Skills we may no longer need

Links & References

• Meta Muse – Meta’s launch announcement
• Instinct – the invite-only personal agent
• OpenAI dots – OpenAI’s launch announcement
• Grok Bot – xAI’s X Subscription announcement
• Claude Duet – Anthropic’s product page
• OpenClaw – the open-source always-on agent
• Danske Bank – business customers can bank through AI agents
• Beacon58 – home of Lumen and the AI Fluency programme

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome to LinkedIn Live
• 00:54 The agent line-up
• 01:52 Meta Muse and why the market reacted
• 07:23 Instinct
• 09:00 OpenAI’s Dot
• 10:21 Grok’s agent
• 11:54 Anthropic’s Duet
• 14:39 Building our own: Lumen and Workbench
• 20:25 Muse’s memory and where Lumen fits
• 21:22 Audience question: agentic banking and payments
• 24:27 Audience question: outsourcing our thinking
• 27:12 Should your agent challenge you?
• 28:55 Skills we may not need, and wrapping up