Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has introduced Muse for Small Business, a tool that links its Muse AI agent to workplace software popular with small and medium businesses including Asana, Zoom, Intuit, Box, Canva and Slack.
Meta’s Muse for Small Business also connects to Meta ad accounts and to professional Instagram and Facebook profiles, so small business owners can manage marketing and operations through a single AI agent. Meta didn’t disclose pricing. As a reference point, the company pointed to its existing Muse app, which is free with usage limits and offers a paid subscription for people who exceed them.
Meta framed the launch around delegation. “Give Muse a goal, like running your business or finding new customers, and it gets it done,” the company wrote in its announcement. It also explained why it built the tool: “Small businesses have been growing on our apps for nearly two decades. They told us they’re short on hours, not ideas. So we built Muse for Small Business to help get work done with the tools they already use.” Meta says 200 million small businesses use Facebook.
Nathan Daggett, who runs marketing for Live Bearded in Phoenix, Arizona, explained how Muse has helped his small business:
AI is the great equalizer. As a small business we don’t have the budget to hire a data scientist, so this is data and analytics that used to be out of reach for us. I had Muse go through 87,000 customer reviews from our website and build a full strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis of the business out of them. Doing that by hand would have taken me months. Muse did it in a few minutes.”
The launch follows Monday’s announcement of a new enterprise platform that will include a Muse agent, a business agent and a coding tool. Meta hired former MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run it. Taken together, the two moves point to a broader push to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic for business customers. The timing wasn’t subtle either: Tuesday’s announcement landed on the same day as OpenAI’s developer day.
Muse itself had a fast start. The app rolled out September 8 and climbed to the top of Apple’s App Store, passing ChatGPT. Evercore analyst Mark Mahaney told CNBC he expects Muse to hit 100 million users within six to 12 months.
The bigger picture is Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on AI as a business driver, a bet backed by billions of dollars spent last year recruiting AI talent, most notably Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang. Wang now leads Meta’s AI efforts, and his group started rolling out new models under the Muse Spark family in April. At Meta’s Connect event last week in Menlo Park, California, on September 24, Zuckerberg called Muse the “centerpiece” of his AI strategy.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.