AI agents are finally useful for home and family life!
How I’m using personal AI agents for family logistics, household research, calendars, vendors, errands, and decisions instead of another pile of tabs.
By Mollie Amkraut Mueller · · 4 min read
For a long time, people have asked me how I use AI as a parent and homeowner. My answer was usually: constantly for work, but not much for running my household. It can’t do my laundry.
Spoiler: AI still can’t do laundry. But lately I’ve been handing agents a LOT more of my life admin. They’re finding vendors, sending emails, organizing the school calendar, following up, and bringing me decisions instead of another pile of tabs to read.
If you’ve wondered what an AI agent could do for your home or family, here’s what I’ve been trying.
Why I’d start with Muse
Most of the examples further down were done with Grok Bot because I started using it first. Now I’m trying Muse, Meta’s new personal agent. So far, Muse and Grok Bot feel capable of handling many of the same jobs. For most people starting today, I’d point to Muse: it's wildly easy to use, there’s a free tier, and it connects to the Meta world where many of us already have years’ worth of saved things.
When I wrote about Grok Bot a few weeks ago, a lot of you told me that an Elon product was a nonstarter. Muse gives you another option.
What I’ve handed Muse so far
I saw someone turn their saved Instagram recipes into a searchable cookbook. I immediately wanted the home-decor version: please turn my saved Instagram Home collection into something I can actually flip through.
Muse’s first attempt was text-only PDFs. I told it a home inspiration collection without photos was fairly useless, and it rebuilt the Home collection as a visual PDF with images from 92 of its 100 posts. And it's fast! Much faster than ChatGPT.
I also asked Muse to gather the 20 latest posts from a financial-education Instagram account I follow and tell me which advice looked legitimate and which applied to our family: two kids, a home, and my sole-proprietor business. It made a Word document with summaries and links to each post, an action plan for Christoph (my husband) and me, and cautions where a claim needed checking.
Also, while I was writing this, Meta announced Muse Charm: a little pocket-size device with a face on its screen that lets you talk to your agent. It looks like a Tamagotchi! Meta says it’ll share more details later this year, so for now I’m just admiring the adorable tiny creature.
What I’ve handed over to Grok Bot
(But Muse could handle just fine)
- Christoph’s birthday has its own agent. I creatively named it Christoph Birthday Planner. It found local bakeries and breweries, wrote genuinely good emails requesting cake and keg quotes, compared vendors for personalized beer mugs, researched German caterers, and helped negotiate a catering contract. It tracks the replies and reminds me what needs a decision next.
- It did the school calendar in about 20 seconds. I told it to find the school calendar PDF in an email from Ayla’s school and add every closure and early dismissal to my Google Calendar and invite Christoph to each event. One shot. Flawless execution. Parents, you know how disproportionately exciting this is.
- It turned a household complaint into actual options. Airplane noise has been bothering Christoph at night, so I asked Grok Bot to research companies that could help insulate our house. It contacted six, gathered their responses, and drafted an email to him that basically said, “Hi honey, I know this has been bothering you. Here are our options and prices.”
- It helped me finish a gallery wall. I handed it a folder of images of our favorite pubs and it resized them for the arrangement, found frames, and worked out the exact settings to print them at home. The individual steps weren’t difficult. The sheer number of them was what kept the project unfinished.
- It tackled the administrative odds and ends. It found the nearest passport office, booked an appointment for baby Louis, and listed the documents we need to bring. It paused my Audible subscription, a task Audible has made into something of a treasure hunt. It also contested Christoph’s parking ticket by email. We lost, but I can’t blame the bot for my husband’s poor parking judgment.
- It found money. Inspired by this Amazon refund experiment, I asked Grok Bot to review my purchases, and I got $35 back. I also tried this unclaimed-money prompt, which surfaced potential claims worth several thousand dollars connected to my late grandparents. If the claims had been in my name, Grok Bot could have helped me file them. Because they’re my grandparents’ and I’m not the executor, it stopped there.
There have been smaller experiments too: sorting out a clothing order I accidentally sent to an old address, figuring out which credit cards we should keep/cancel, and finding the artists in a neighborhood art walk with links to their work, so I could decide if I wanted to go.
If you want to try Muse, join here. I am not paid to promote this, however you can redeem my share code ZZNUE9 in Settings and we’ll both get 1 billion Muse tokens (whatever that means). Then give it one task that’s been lingering on your list. “Figure out who I need to email about this, then draft emails” is a perfectly good prompt.
If you've been wondering what the work version of this looks like for your team, that's what my AI Workflow Diagnostic is for.
Also: more AI Arts & Crafts
Last week’s AI Arts & Crafts was such a good time. We made watercolors of our houses, paint-by-numbers kits, archaeological portraits of our desks, and newspapers from cities where landmarks are made of food. Here’s a look at what everyone made.
I’m doing it again Friday, October 16, at 12:30 PM Pacific, online. No artistic or technical experience required. Come make something with us.
I’m also offering private AI Arts & Crafts sessions for company holiday gatherings. It’s an online hour where everyone makes something personal and surprising together, even if they’ve never used AI to make art. If that sounds good for your team, reply with roughly how many people you have and when you’re planning your holiday gathering. I'm booking November and December sessions now.
Would love to hear your reactions to these agents. Reply and tell me the one household task you'd hand off first!