Meta launches Muse for Small Business

Meta on September 29 launched Muse for Small Business, a version of its personal AI agent Muse with features built for running a business. Muse can now connect to Instagram professional account analytics, Facebook Pages and Meta ad accounts in a few clicks, and it links to dozens of outside work tools that handle a company's books, storefront and customer records. Meta said most features will be free, with subscription plans for people who want more, but it did not give specific prices.

Muse is the personal AI agent Meta launched in the US and Canada on September 8 to complete tasks on a user's behalf. According to reports, it climbed to the top of Apple's App Store shortly after launch, passing ChatGPT, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Muse the "centerpiece" of his AI strategy at Meta Connect last week. A day before this announcement, Meta said it had hired CJ Desai, formerly CEO of MongoDB, to launch an enterprise AI platform that will also include a Muse agent, a business agent and a coding tool. METAL has previously reported on Meta hiring the MongoDB CEO to launch an enterprise AI business and on the launch of its personal agent Muse.

"Small businesses have been growing on our apps for nearly two decades," Meta said in its announcement. "They told us they're short on hours, not ideas." Meta has said there are 200 million small businesses on Facebook. Tom Mulholland, owner of Mulholland Grocery in Malvern, Iowa, who is quoted in the announcement, said, "I work about 65 hours a week, and there are so many things where I'm the only one who can do them. I need to free up time for the work that actually makes my business money: cutting the steaks, making the sausages," adding that "Muse is taking over a few of them."

The list of connected services is broad. According to reports, the 15 newly added services are Asana, Box, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, Granola, HighLevel, Intuit QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Lovable, Notion, Shopify, Slack, Stripe and Zoom. Meta said the full list is available in the Muse app settings and will keep growing, and partners who want to integrate can apply at muse.ai/platform. Services that are not yet supported can be plugged in by users through custom connectors. "The real magic happens when it's fully connected to your existing work, your context and your brand," said Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer. "By connecting Muse with Canva, all of that becomes part of your conversations."

The uses Meta highlights center on sales, advertising and finances: analyzing this year's sales, campaigns and social activity to build a growth plan for next year's goals, reviewing this month's financial performance to find expenses that look off, or sorting through email, calendar and news to pull out what needs attention and take it off the owner's plate. Meta said Muse also brings its own ideas, such as flagging emails that need a reply and drafting first responses, and that an Ideas tab suggests more ways to use it.

Reactions from early users and partners, published in the announcement as quote cards, are described in concrete tasks. Mulholland said that when he photographed his employees' time cards, Muse added them up and cut at least 15 minutes from payroll. Loredana Crisan, Figma's chief design officer, said, "Any team or business can bring the brand they've designed and built in Figma to everything they make with Muse." Stripe said users can find new customers, send invoices and payment links, manage products and prices, and analyze revenue inside Muse without leaving the chat.

The market read the expansion as a signal that Meta is moving into business software. According to reports, Meta's stock rose 25% in September, and Evercore's Mark Mahaney expects Muse to reach 100 million users within six to 12 months. The announcement landed on the same day as OpenAI's developer event. Meta, which has relied on advertising for almost all of its revenue, appears to be entering the enterprise market where OpenAI and Anthropic compete by starting with small businesses.

The Meta announcement METAL reviewed does not include a full list of connected services or any price levels. It points readers to the app settings for the list, and on pricing says only that Muse is free for most of what people need, with subscriptions for more. The 20 testimonials from users and partners appear as 20 quote-card images rather than body text. According to reports, Meta says Muse was built with layers of privacy and security, though the possibility that the agent could behave unpredictably or misinterpret an instruction was also raised.

Seen through a tech lawyer's lens, what changes with this expansion is whose data the agent handles. The personal Muse looked at a user's own email and calendar. Muse for Small Business reads QuickBooks books, Stripe payments and customer records in Klaviyo and HighLevel, and it sends invoices and replies to customers. The customers in those records are third parties who never agreed to Muse's terms of use. The announcement does not address whether responsibility lies with the business owner, Meta or the connected service when the agent sends a miscalculated invoice or replies to the wrong customer. Meta said it will release more connectors and skills in the coming months. The more connections there are, the more small businesses hand over not just their time but authority over their customers' data.