Meta’s has an ad for its new AI Agent, Muse, that shows a guy running and telling his agent to signup for a half marathon.
We tried it out. Not quite as easy as the commercial implies. But if you are willing to give it your RunSignup password, set up a virtual payment card with Stripe, it can be pretty easy the second time.
Note that the RunSignup AI Website Agent will be providing similar capabilities. We did a demo of a similar checkout flow last November, but have not released it yet for reasons you will see below…
It will be interesting to see how many people will trust AI Agents to have the type of access they want. Maybe over time it will become as common as paying with ApplePay (which is about 30% of checkouts today on RunSignup).
First Time Registration
Muse is good at searching for events on RunSignup, GiveSignup and TicketSignup. The key feature it has is the ability to “see” a web browser, navigate it, and enter information. It is acting like a human, filling in forms and clicking on buttons on websites like RunSignup. RunSignup has a long history of supporting Accessibility as a way to make our websites more convenient for people with vision impairment (Read this blog and watch the video in it to learn more about Accessibility). It turns out AI can understand websites and checkout flows better that support Accessibility.
So once you decide on an event, it basically opens a browser and interacts with it. It gives the option of the user opening the browser themselves:
Trusting AI
After finding the website, reading the info and asking for the appropriate information the next trick is trusting AI enough to make this useable and convenient. We went ahead (not using any of our real accounts).
We would take this moment to note that this type of capability has been available for a while with Claude and ChatGPT. It can be pretty amazing to see AI understand a webpage and begin to take action. One of the examples we ran with Claude CoWork was to tell it to create a price increase email to past participants. It successfully navigated the RunSignup dashboard and created an email using our components like buttons, generated appropriate content, chose the email list of past participants and excluded existing participants and was ready for us to tell it to send the email.
What is unique about Muse is that this is the first one really built for consumers. And it has the Facebook and Instagram social networks behind it. Which might mean it gains traction. One thing to note is that you have to go into Facebook or Instagram to grant Muse access to your information in those accounts.
Chat Can Be Awkward
Chat interfaces can be quite awkward when compared with modern web and mobile based applications. Multiple interactions asking for shirt size or address if not filled out right in the first steps seem cumbersome.
Payment
You have to enable Stripe Link to make payments. This is a secure payment mechanism. However, note that users will need to be comfortable giving AI a credit card and will have to trust it does not go rogue.
Note it is trained to ask for approval before processing any payment.
It does have limitations like not supporting ApplePay and some of the conveniences that come with that.
Second Time Signup
For those people using Muse and signing up for multiple events on RunSignup (there are well over a million people who signup for multiple events per year on RunSignup), the second time is much easier. Muse remembers things like the RunSignup login, as well as preferences and details (much like RunSignup does). So it was simply asking which event, and agreeing to the waiver on the second race we signed up for:
Summary
The good news is that events using our platform are ready to go with AI Agent signups. However, it is very early days and likely very few signups from this method. AI Agent signups will likely increase over time, and RunSignup is planning on enabling interactive signup via our AI Chat product for Websites in early 2027. We think that will be a more trustworthy process for customers.