Give your AI agent its own identity to avoid lock-in
Don't get locked into a personal AI agent. One of the advantages of Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, is its integration with Instagram. It's extremely useful to have an agent search Instagram and summarize reels and posts. It's also really cute! But using Muse locks you in.
You can avoid this by creating a separate identity for your agent. It's a bit of work, but you can get a prepaid phone plan and a cheap phone to get a valid phone number you can use for Google, a model provider, etc. Ideally, you run your agent on a computer inside your home so that it can access sites that usually block non-residential IP addresses.
This way, you can use the best agent for your needs, like Muse for Instagram-related things, or Gemini for multimodal use cases (audio, image, video, etc.) and web search. Treat vendor agents like tools that your own agent calls.
You'll be missing out on native features like automations and workflows, but you can build those with your own personal AI agent. Sure, it's nice to own your data, but the big advantage here is that you can customize your agent to your liking.
Another plus to building your own agent is that you can build multiplayer from the start. Coordination in a multi-agent setting is difficult; sharing an agent with your partner or family makes things easier.