September 21, 2026
An agent is now spending your money: Meta bought socks, groceries and booked cleaning in a day
Gergely Oros objects: people do not hand socks and groceries to an agent; they decide for themselves.
Gergely Orosz
@gergelyorosz
I am continually amazed at how the industry fails to understand this: most people will not hand AI agents their digital wallets to go out and spend. Buying socks and groceries is not a routine task people outsource unsupervised, but spending they manage themselves...
It’s funny, Meta went from having my Instagram and WhatsApp data to now having access to my email, calendar, DoorDash, Amazon and pretty much everything. In the last 24 hours, it bought me socks, ordered my Whole Foods groceries, booked a cleaning service and got me a burger for dinner. Meta’s last disclosed North American Facebook ARPU was around $227/year, largely from ads. I suspect it can push that number significantly higher now that it understands not only what I look at, but what I need, what I buy and what I’m planning to do. Also the much bigger opportunity might be becoming the aggregation layer between me and the entire internet. If Meta can take even a tiny percentage of the commerce it facilitates, or of the money it saves me, this could become enormous! It already saved me $200 by canceling subscriptions and services I no longer needed. This feels much bigger than better ad targeting. Ads are useful but giving me money back is better imo. One additional thought: the agent is increasingly making the decisions for me. I knew nothing about that burger place. The agent researched it, told me which burger I should order, and I just said “okay” without giving it much more thought. Agents are becoming the decision makers in both B2C and B2B. Increasingly, every business will be selling not just to humans, but to their agents. Everything becomes B2A: business to agents.
· 330.9K views
In 24 hours, a Meta agent bought socks, ordered groceries from Whole Foods, called a cleaner, and brought a burger for dinner.
The user gave it access to email, calendar, DoorDash, and Amazon. Before that, Meta knew only what it could see on Instagram and WhatsApp.
Gergely Oros, author of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, turns the story into a market rule: the industry is building agents with access to money and treating people’s consent as already given.
They used to promise; now they charge. In 2023, AutoGPT collected 100 thousand stars in a few months, while the first wave of agents produced almost no finished products. Three years later, an agent does not draw up an action plan; it places an order and charges a card.
What is at stake. In North America, Facebook brings Meta $227 per user per year, almost all of it from advertising. It is the company’s latest disclosed figure, and less than $20 a month for a person scrolling the feed.
The user expects that figure to rise: Meta now knows not a list of views, but a list of purchases and plans.
Meta’s earnings will provide the next marker: revenue per user in North America will show whether people handed over their wallets.
* Meta Platforms Inc. is recognized in Russia as an extremist organization, and its activities are prohibited; Facebook and Instagram are blocked. Meta AI and other company products are products of this organization.
