Meta is adding an AI agent to its social media universe. On Tuesday, it launched Muse, a personal AI agent that will sit inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, and can act autonomously to do everything from messaging friends to planning a night out, to outfit shopping for a holiday.
Muse is a personal AI assistant that users can talk to “just like messaging another person”, like an AI chatbot, that is also capable of acting on the user’s behalf and can even “suggest ideas”, according to the company’s blog post about the news. Muse is rolling out to adults in the US for free first, and Meta plans to add the agent to its AI smart glasses soon, but didn’t provide a timeline or specify which agentic features this would involve.
For shopping, this means Muse can move beyond finding and comparing products to actually navigating checkout and paying on a user’s behalf, presenting the final transaction total in the Muse interface chat for the consumer to approve before completing the purchase.
The new Muse AI agent can connect to consumers’ Facebook and Instagram accounts and access their DMs when they grant it permission, the Financial Times reports. WhatsApp is more restricted: because personal messages are end-to-end encrypted, Muse can only draw on information a user explicitly shares with the agent.
Meta isn’t the first tech giant to bring AI into checkout — OpenAI launched (and subsequently pivoted away from) its Instant Checkout last year, and Google launched its “Universal Cart” in May. Both sought to shorten the journey from AI product discovery to purchase, but Muse goes further by positioning the agent to navigate checkout and transact on the consumer’s behalf.
But Meta is betting that years of social signals about what its users follow, watch, save and share could give Muse something other shopping agents lack: an understanding of their taste.
Max Sinclair, CEO of Azoma AI, which works with brands and retailers to improve their agentic commerce discovery, says that the top AI shopping agents right now are Gemini, ChatGPT, Alexa for Shopping and Walmart Sparky.
“But I think Muse could shoot straight to being the fifth — largely because Meta has 3.6 billion people using its apps daily, and this is going to be integrated across all of them,” Sinclair adds. “It’s probably going to be unavoidable for people, because it’s just in front of them all the time.”
Meta enters the AI shopping race
Meta has been experimenting with AI-powered shopping since earlier this year, allowing users to search and compare products and draw on content from brands and creators. However, it’s shared little evidence of consumer adoption so far. This week, Mastercard forecast that one in 10 shoppers will use a personal AI agent to purchase products and services on their behalf by 2030, but most surveys suggest that consumers are currently skeptical of the tech at best.
Our own Vogue Business AI consumer perception survey, released in April, found that only 31% of consumers would outsource shopping to an AI agent, even if it knew their taste and purchase history. This is largely down to fundamental distrust of how AI companies handle their data: 72% say they would not share card details, 46% would not share browsing history, and 40% say they would not share location data.
For Meta, those concerns come with additional baggage. The company has faced years of scrutiny over how it collects and uses consumer data, while its smart glasses have more recently become a flashpoint in a broader debate around surveillance and consent. Those concerns become more consequential with Muse. While Meta AI, its existing assistant across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, could already help consumers find, compare and choose products, Muse asks consumers to go much further: trusting Meta not just to recommend what to buy, but to act — and ultimately spend their money — on their behalf.
