Meta launches Muse for small businesses: an AI agent that runs the shop, but not yet in Africa

On Tuesday 29 September, Meta announced “Muse for Small Business”, a version of its artificial intelligence agent designed for small business owners. Launched on 8 September for consumers in the United States and Canada, Muse can already shop, book travel, send emails and make payments for its user. According to Reuters, citing the firm Sensor Tower, the app was downloaded about 2.8 million times in two weeks.

Plugged into the tools of the trade

The business version can read analytics from Facebook Pages and Instagram business accounts, and work with Meta ad accounts. It also connects to around fifteen services: Shopify for the online shop, Stripe for payments, QuickBooks for accounting, Canva, Slack, Notion, Zoom and Dropbox. Owners can build their own connectors for tools Meta does not support yet.

Meta gives a few example requests: spotting unusual expenses in the month, sorting through an overflowing inbox, or building a growth plan for next year from sales, campaigns and social media. The company says the agent will not post anything, send any message or buy anything without the owner’s approval. According to Vishal Shah, vice-president of AI products, about one in three Muse users had already linked it to a business account. Among the early testers, a grocer in Iowa who works about 65 hours a week says he wants to free up time for what really earns him money: cutting meat and making sausages.

Like the consumer version, Muse for small businesses is free for most uses, with subscriptions for heavy use. The launch is part of a wider strategy: Meta, which lives almost entirely on advertising, is looking for other revenue. The day before, the group announced a platform to sell its AI to large companies, led by CJ Desai, the former chief executive of MongoDB.

The start has not been smooth. Last week, Amazon removed Muse from its store, complaining that the agent did not identify itself and appeared to store customers’ login credentials, which Meta denies. Giving an AI access to your accounts, your customers and your campaigns means trusting both its reliability and the way Meta handles that data.