Humans Are Still Doing the Hard Parts for AI Agents at Dazzle, Duckbill and Wajo
Phone calls, scheduling and CAPTCHAs still trip up personal AI agents, so startups are routing those tasks to human contractors, CNBC reports.
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Some personal AI agents still hand their hardest jobs to people. Marissa Mayer's Dazzle AI, Duckbill and Wajo AI all send phone calls, bookings and other tasks that trip up the software to human contractors, CNBC reported on October 31.
Photo: geralt / Pixabay
Where the software breaks
CNBC reports that today's foundation models, including those from Meta and OpenAI, still can't reliably take actions across the web, especially when a phone call is involved. Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO who now runs Dazzle AI, said top models are good at finding home renovation services but "might blow it" when it is time to book and schedule a new roof.
"We're relying on the frontier models to give us good suggestions and a good candidate list, but we're checking that over to make sure that we're really delivering the type of service that we can stand behind," Mayer told CNBC.
Duckbill CEO Meghan Joyce named the usual roadblocks: making a phone call, scheduling a doctor's appointment, or booking a couch cleaning from a local service. For tasks that need real-world judgment, she said, humans still beat AI.
| Company | Who's quoted | What humans handle |
|---|---|---|
| Dazzle AI | CEO Marissa Mayer | Tasks the agent flags, such as home projects |
| Duckbill | CEO Meghan Joyce | Calls, appointments and local services, offered to other agent makers through an API |
| Wajo AI | CEO Shivani Poddar | Phone calls and CAPTCHA tests |
| Meta (Muse) | Spokesperson | Contractors were used in internal tests only. Meta says no humans complete users' requests today |
A glass tabletop in a window
Mayer described a Dazzle power user who asked the agent to handle a roof replacement, a broken window and the purchase of a glass tabletop all at once. The agent confused window glass with tabletop glass and ended up "trying to figure out if he could make the tabletop fit in the window."
Dazzle's system flagged the task and passed it to a person. "Within a few seconds, the human had things sorted out. Whereas an agent would have burned a ridiculous number of tokens," Mayer said. "Or they may never have gotten to a good solution."
Humans as an API
Duckbill recently launched an API that lets companies building personal agents pass the tasks their agents are likely to fumble to human contract workers. "We work on a model that is not dissimilar from Uber, where we boil tasks down into atomic bite-sized pieces," said Joyce, who previously worked at Uber. "And then we track what happens," she said.
Wajo AI's Poddar uses people for phone calls and for CAPTCHA tests built to keep bots off websites. "I think AI plus humans, collaborative AI, is what you need to actually get the job done," she said.
The privacy question
CNBC notes users have good reason to worry about humans stepping in, especially if a company hasn't explained how it works. Meta employees previously raised privacy concerns about an internal test that used contractors to make phone calls for its Muse agent. Meta does not currently use humans to complete users' Muse requests, CNBC reported.
Joyce said Duckbill does "full background checking" on its 1099 contractors, whom she compared to Uber and DoorDash drivers. Mayer said Dazzle screens for people who are "extremely discreet" and able to "forget and compartmentalize that information afterwards."
Mayer calls this a "transitionary period" until models can handle complex web tasks and calls as well as people. "We're not even trying to hide it, we think the human in the loop is a benefit," she said.
What to do if you use an AI assistant
- Ask who completes tasks. Check whether a service says when a person, not software, handles your request.
- Limit sensitive details. Assume anything you give an agent for phone calls or bookings may be seen by a contractor.
- Builders: plan disclosure in from the start if you use human fallback.
For the software side of computer use, see our report on Vercel Labs' agent-desktop 1.0.
More coverage is on our Artificial Intelligence hub.
How we reported this
This article is based on CNBC's October 31 report by Jonathan Vanian, which we read in full. We checked every quote word for word against that report.
Published and fact-checked October 31, 2026.
Sources
- CNBC, Jonathan Vanian, "Humans are still doing the work behind some AI agents," Oct. 31, 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/31/ai-agents-humans-dazzle-duckbill-meta.html
DailyMech used AI tools to help research and draft this article; it was fact-checked by our editors.