The fluffy, rosy-cheeked Muse mascot, launched by Meta six weeks ago to warm people up to the idea of having a personal AI agent, might fit the bill. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts during the company’s Oct. 21 earnings conference call that more than 10 million users in Canada and the United States have installed Muse agents since they became available Sept. 8.
“To put that in perspective, that’s more than twice the level that Threads started at or where we think other AI applications started as well,” Zuckerberg said.
Muse can perform multi-step tasks on behalf of users, such as browsing the web, sending emails, and booking travel. A quarter of Muse users use it daily, and the most common use case is shopping, Zuckerberg said, with an average purchase amount exceeding $200. Demand for Muse was so high that Meta had to work with payment processor Stripe to increase credit limits within the first week, although it did not specify by how much. Meta had partnered with Stripe to enable Muse purchases from the start.
“We had to work with Stripe to increase credit limits because volumes were higher than any of us expected,” Zuckerberg said.
This early buying activity provides Meta with the opportunity to turn its billions in AI investments into another revenue stream. Rather than simply selling ads to businesses in hopes of reaching potential customers, Meta plans to charge businesses a fee when Muse helps them close a sale. Using the agent will be free for consumers, unless they want to use more tokens or more advanced models.
Meta’s advertising revenue generated $63.1 billion in the third quarter. Zuckerberg said Meta earns “several hundred dollars a year” from its family of apps for each U.S. user, and he expects Muse to generate even more revenue per user as purchasing activity grows.
“We expect Muse to reach an even higher level over time due to the volume of trade we are already seeing,” he said.
Meta did not respond to FortuneRequest for comment from Stripe declined to comment.
A future without commercial sites?
Meta’s ambitions for Muse go beyond helping customers shop online. The tech giant envisions a network of personal AI agents interacting with companies’ AI agents instead of browsing a website.
Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said the company is working with partners such as Shopify and Walmart to develop a standard called Personal Agent Protocol to define how consumer agents can securely interact with a company’s agents.
For retailers, this could cede control of the shopping experience to Meta. Instead of discovering and browsing websites themselves, customers could delegate these tasks to Muse. That could help businesses find customers, but it also gives Meta greater influence over which sellers consumers discover and where they ultimately spend their money.
Li acknowledged that adoption “will likely be uneven” among companies that are reluctant to abandon customer relationships. But she added that at some point, when officers demonstrate they can operate safely, “more and more businesses will be happy to participate.”
“We expect the market, eventually, to move away from agents trying to navigate every digital experience like a human being,” Li said.
The expensive business of AI shopping
Meta faces another obstacle to his vision of agent shopping: Muse is expensive to run.
The tech giant spent nearly $35 billion on capital expenditures in the third quarter, driven by AI servers, data centers and network infrastructure, and reported negative free cash flow of $2.1 billion, according to its third-quarter earnings report. Li said on the call that Meta expects investments to be between $135 billion and $145 billion for the full year, up from $72.2 billion last year.
Zuckerberg said Muse’s computing requirements are part of the reason Meta limited its launch to the United States and Canada. The company ultimately wants to serve more than 1 billion Muse users, but to achieve that scale it requires greater computational efficiency.
“In the short term, Muse is computationally intensive, but we expect to improve its profitability by more than 10x over the next year,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta has traditionally focused on attracting users to new products before finding ways to make money from them. But Zuckerberg told analysts that Meta plans to start monetizing Muse earlier than usual with the new products, citing the cost of running the agent and the number of purchases already made.
“We’re going to work on monetization a little earlier than our usual playbook,” he said. “In doing so, I think we will be able to build a model where we get a percentage of the value that we help create for people. »
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