AI personal assistant: Muse, Grok Bot and the one that knows your files
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Within a few weeks, two tech giants launched their AI personal assistant. xAI unveiled Grok Bot in August 2026, Meta unveiled Muse in September. The idea is no longer a chatbot that answers, but an assistant that knows your working life and genuinely helps. The question is what you want to hand it.
What Muse and Grok Bot do
Muse, launched by Meta on 8 September 2026, presents itself as a personal agent. You talk to it like a person, in the Muse app or in WhatsApp. It can send an email, book travel or fill in a form, and it asks for your approval before sensitive actions. It runs on a dedicated virtual computer in the cloud and remembers what matters to you. It is rolling out in the US first.
Grok Bot, launched in beta by xAI on 11 August 2026, offers always-on "teammates". Each bot has its own computer, signs into your tools, keeps working while you're away and only comes back for an approval. It remembers your conversations and learns how you like things done.
What they share: the personal assistant is no longer a general answer engine. Its value comes from what it knows about you: your messages, your files, your habits.
Two families of assistants
The assistant that acts carries out tasks for you: buying, booking, filling in, following up. That's the promise of Muse and Grok Bot. Powerful, but you have to open up a lot of access and keep an eye on what it does.
The assistant that knows answers from your own information: "Where are we on the Martin quote?", "What did the client say about the deadline?", "What meetings do I have today?". It doesn't guess: it retrieves, summarises and cites its sources. That's the principle of personal RAG.
In office work, the second is often the more useful day to day. Before delegating an action, you need to know where things stand — and that's where most days get lost.
Questions to ask before choosing
Where does your data live? A personal assistant sees your emails, contracts and clients. Ask where they are hosted, whether access is read-only, and whether there is a GDPR-compliant data processing agreement (DPA).
Who stays in control? An agent that sends emails or pays on its own saves time, but a mistake is costly. Check that it asks for your approval and keeps a record of what it did.
What does it rely on? An answer without a source is an opinion. Prefer an assistant that shows where the information comes from, so you can check it in one click.
Virtus Lever, the personal assistant that knows your files
Virtus Lever focuses on the assistant that knows, made in France. Its AI chat answers your questions by searching your emails, calendar, documents and notes, and it shows its sources. You can add your files (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text) and correct an answer: the correction is saved.
It connects to Gmail, Outlook or any IMAP address with read-only access. Data is hosted in the EU, in Frankfurt, with a data processing agreement (DPA) available. And each morning its Domino algorithm shows you the highest-leverage email: the assistant also knows where to start.
Muse and Grok Bot aim to act everywhere on your behalf. Lever aims to give you back your working memory, in Europe, under your control. To go further, read our guide to building a second brain with AI.
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