THE CRUNCH
Meta's personal AI agent Muse has been set up by more than 10 million users since its early September rollout in the US and Canada, the company said on its third-quarter earnings call. Mark Zuckerberg told investors that about a quarter of people who set up Muse now use it daily, and that shopping has become the agent's most common use. Over a quarter of Muse's engaged shoppers made purchases averaging more than $200, a figure Zuckerberg said had surprised even industry insiders. He quoted the payments firm Plaid, whose connector Muse uses to link to bank accounts, as saying it had not seen activity like this on any other service.
The adoption figures confirmed estimates published earlier in the week by the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Beyond shopping, Zuckerberg said popular uses include personal productivity tasks such as connecting the agent to email or calendars, which he framed as evidence that users trust Muse's security setup. That setup includes a "Muse Secure VM" feature, with a forthcoming "Muse Confidential VM" intended to prevent even Meta from seeing users' content.
Monetisation is now the focus. Meta plans to keep Muse free for most consumers while taking a percentage of commerce on the platform and charging businesses fees for agent-facilitated transactions, with AI subscriptions for heavier users. Zuckerberg predicted Muse would eventually generate more revenue per user than Meta's family of apps, which currently bring in several hundreds of dollars annually per American user. He said Muse is very compute-intensive today but that Meta expects to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year, making it profitable once revenue reaches scale.
Muse is also becoming central to Meta's smart glasses push, with the agent arriving on the glasses next month, though Meta has not said whether that will require a separate subscription. Zuckerberg additionally teased a "Muse network" in which users' agents would work with those of friends and family, and transact directly with businesses' own agents rather than visiting websites.