After several swings and misses over the past half-decade (looking at you, metaverse), Meta has scored a win. It really needed one. Beyond the broader win in its ad business – now fueled by AI ad targeting – Muse has come out of nowhere. And it could be a consumer shopping powerhouse.
First of all, what is Muse? The name of the game in the AI race is now agentic apps. This is part of a broader trend of evolving from the age of apps, to the age of assistants (e.g., ChatGPT) to the age of agents. The latter is all about advanced multistep workflows in the background, on behalf of any user.
Muse is Meta’s answer to this land grab, going up against the likes of Grok Bot and Anthropic’s Duet, just launched this week. Muse’s claim to fame is that it’s simple to use, built mostly around a friendly persona and chat interface. This has attracted the masses who are averse to techy interfaces or terminals.
And that’s backed up by the numbers. Muse surpassed 10 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days. To put that into perspective, it puts Muse in an exclusive club of just 12 apps to ever reach that milestone. Those include Threads (another Meta app), Fortnite, PUBG Mobile, Pokémon GO, and Disney+.
Shop Talk
But more important than sheer usage are usage patterns and engagement. For example, according to comments made during Meta’s Q3 earnings call, 25 percent of Muse users engage daily. And even more important than that is use cases. Specifically, shopping has emerged as one of Muse’s top activities.
Specifically, Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that 25+ percent of Muse’s engaged users who have used the app for shopping, did so with an average purchase value of $200+. This is a considerable finding in that the dollar amounts signal’s high stakes and thus trust – previously agentic shopping’s biggest deterrent.
“Plaid told us that they hadn’t seen activity like they’re seeing with their connector on any other service before,” Zuckerberg said in the earnings call. As background, Muse uses Plaid’s connector for agentic shopping, given that Plaid is a trusted engine for connecting payment apps to users’ bank accounts.
In Muse’s case, we’re talking about users that explain what they want and give it permission to find and purchase products for them. Benefits include saving time, and being able to capture limited-window deals through a diligent agent that scours shopping channels better than you ever could on your own.
SMB Staples
But when it comes to Muse, it’s not just about consumers. Meta is burning fuel to cultivate business-facing functions. That includes the standard list of productivity functions like writing emails, organizing your calendar, presenting financials, and myriad other functions unlocked through app integrations.
But the more interesting elements for the Localogyverse is Meta’s explicit focus on SMBs. For example, there are several app integrations it recently announced expressly for small businesses. These include connectors for Shopify, Dropbox, Slack, Canva, Figma, Quickbooks, and several other SMB staples.
That creates a broader set of agentic possibilities for SMBs, including everything from bookkeeping to eCommerce. For example, Muse can plug into Shopify to learn what a business sells, then be able to field incoming customer questions, while training itself on the SMB’s Instagram account to learn its “voice.”
Lastly, Muse could be the right play for SMBs for another reason noted above: simplicity. The same thing that makes it appealing for mainstream consumers – including a friendly persona and chat interface – could make it the agent of choice in the SMB realm. We’ll watch for that as the land grab continues.
