Meta will earn money from its personal artificial intelligence (AI) agent Muse by taking a cut of what the agent buys, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at Connect on September 23. Advertising brings Meta almost all its revenue.
Beyond the hardware launches, the keynote set out where the company is taking the product. The transcript can be accessed here. To see all the products announced at the event, you can read this article.
First, Meta is not planning to sell ads inside Muse. “Muse also has a novel business model. We believe that Muse will make you money. We’re standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions,” Zuckerberg said.
Alexander Wang, who leads the product, gave examples of what that means in practice. Muse negotiated with a cable company through its online support chat and “knocked $85 a month off the bill”. It saved users money on car and home insurance and “hunted out refunds they didn’t even know were owed”.
Second, Meta has already built the commerce infrastructure behind that fee. Its blog lists what Muse connects to.
- Payments: Stripe’s Link, Shop Pay and PayPal
- Retail: Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, Wayfair, Michael Kors, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods and Fanatics
- Travel and groceries: Expedia and Instacart
- Work: Notion, Granola, GitHub and Box
“Muse can access the entire Shopify product catalog agentically and use Link and now Shop Pay to buy almost anything on the internet,” Wang said. Meta opened its connector platform to outside developers last week and received “over 1,500 applications” in under a week.
Third, retailers are splitting on whether to let the agent in. Amazon is blocking its own customers from using an agent to buy on its platform, MediaNama founder Nikhil Pahwa wrote on September 22. “A Muse agent on Amazon isn’t an ‘unauthorised agent’. It’s an agent authorised by a customer to shop on its behalf,” he wrote. Walmart, Best Buy and Sephora integrated with Muse.
Pahwa set out why merchants resist. Agents cut into advertising revenue, because “merchants want users on their platforms in order to show them related items, items they’ve browsed before, and show advertising to them”, and advertising now makes up a significant part of Amazon’s revenue. Agents also threaten the customer relationship. “Personal apps like Muse and Instinct threaten Amazon’s relationship with the customer,” he wrote, adding that agents “threaten to become the default for everything for us”.
He expects the fight to reach competition law. “Blocking bots and refusing interoperability is Amazon’s way of preventing a bridge across its moat. The only bridge it will allow is its own: the only agent Amazon will want to authorise is its own,” he wrote. “That will be the beginning of an antitrust case.”
Fourth, Meta is giving Muse room to act unsupervised. Wang said the agent is getting its own email address, so users can add it to a thread or forward mail for it to handle. Meta has added computer vision to the Mac app, which means “with your permission, Muse can now drive any app on your Mac”. He added: “You can walk away from your computer, and it keeps working for you on all the jobs you’ve lined up.”
Zuckerberg described the same pattern on glasses, saying Muse “actually works in the background while you are talking to it”. He recounted the agent ordering ingredients from Instacart during a conversation about a recipe.
Meta says it has built security for that autonomy. “The basic architecture gives every Muse its own private and secure computer. The Muse secure VM is extremely advanced and is ahead of anyone else in the industry,” Zuckerberg said. He added that Meta will “release the Muse confidential VM so that even Meta won’t be able to see that information”, without giving a date.
Muse itself has reached few markets so far. “We just rolled it out in Canada, and more countries are coming soon,” Wang said.
Fifth, Meta has stepped back from the metaverse and put glasses at the centre. “When we started building glasses, we thought at the time that the metaverse, this idea of bringing the physical and digital worlds together, we thought that that would come first, and that advanced AI would come later. But now it is actually quite clear that personal superintelligence will not only come first, it will be much bigger and more important,” Zuckerberg said. He added: “We made the decision to focus a little bit less on metaverse for now, build fewer VR devices, and only release them when we have real breakthroughs.”
On glasses, he set out the scale Meta is aiming at. “There are almost 2 billion people in the world who wear glasses today. Many more if you count sunglasses. We think that in the coming years, most of these are going to get upgraded to AI glasses,” he said, calling them “the only form factor that lets your Muse see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day, and display information right in your vision eventually”.
Nobody has resolved what happens when an agent gets a purchase wrong: Pahwa noted that agents can hallucinate while buying, which raises the question of “how much was authorised” if an agent buys ten items instead of one. He pointed to Visa Intelligent Commerce and UAP, from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), as attempts to address this through prior authentication rules. He argued for pre-authorised wallets “so that the risk transfers to the users from the merchants”.
What Meta did not say: When Muse launches in India, what the transaction fee is, whether retailers pay for placement in Muse’s catalogue, how Muse ranks products when a user asks it to buy something, how it handles authorisation limits, and when the confidential VM arrives.
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