Presence on Demand: Giving Personal AI Agents a Face Without a Body

AI agents can now do real work for us, such as sorting email, scheduling meetings and posting updates. Most of this work happens out of sight, so it is hard to know what the agent did, whether to trust it, or how to give it new instructions. This paper proposes “presence on demand”: a small pocket device keeps an AI agent working in the background, and a human-like AR avatar appears only when the user presses a button, reports what happened and takes new instructions. The paper describes the design, a layered safety approach (permission tiers, a link-opening rule and an independent verifier agent), and a proposed user study to test whether the avatar improves trust and error detection or only makes people over-trust the agent. This is a design paper with a proposed evaluation. The study has not yet been run.