Meta expands Muse AI agent to small business sector
New service integrates with third-party software including Slack, Zoom, and Canva to automate business tasks.
Quick Look
- Meta has launched 'Muse for Small Business,' an AI agent integration for platforms like Slack, Zoom, and Salesforce.
- The move aims to leverage Meta's 200 million small business users as the company shifts focus toward enterprise AI competition against OpenAI and Anthropic.
AI-generated summary
Why It Matters
Meta has been aggressively investing in AI talent and infrastructure to pivot from its core advertising business. The company recently launched the Muse AI agent, which has seen rapid adoption on the Apple App Store.
Coming off the successful launch of its Muse AI agent, Meta is now pushing its new artificial intelligence service into the business world.
Meta on Tuesday unveiled Muse for Small Business that connects its agent to popular software from companies like Asana, Zoom, Intuit, Box, Canva and Salesforce's Slack. The agent can also link to Meta ad accounts and professional Instagram and Facebook profiles.
The company didn't offer details on pricing, but referred at the bottom of its blog post to the existing Muse app, which is free with usage limits and available on a subscription basis beyond that.
The news follows the company's Monday announcement that it will launch a new enterprise platform, poaching MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run it. That platform will include a Muse agent, business agent and a coding tool.
Meta has enjoyed a banner month on Wall Street, with the stock up 25% in September, though it sold off some the past two trading days. The momentum followed the Sept. 8 rollout of Muse, which shot up to the top of Apple's App Store, surpassing ChatGPT. Evercore's Mark Mahaney told CNBC he expects Muse to reach 100 million users within six to 12 months.
"Give Muse a goal — like running your business or finding new customers — and it gets it done," the company said in Tuesday's post.
Long reliant on digital ads for almost all of his company's revenue, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has committed to finding business opportunities with AI, especially after paying billions of dollars last year for top AI talent, most notably Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who's leading the company's efforts. Wang's group started launching new AI models under the Muse Spark family in April.
At Meta Connect last week, Zuckerberg described Muse as the "centerpiece" of his AI strategy.
Meta's latest announcement comes at the same time that OpenAI is holding its developer day. It's the latest sign that the company intends to take on OpenAI and rival Anthropic in the enterprise.
The social media giant already has a strong foothold when it comes to small businesses, as 200 million of them can be found on Facebook, the company says.
"Small businesses have been growing on our apps for nearly two decades," Meta said in the blog post. "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."
Open Questions
- What is the specific pricing structure for Muse for Small Business?
- How will Meta differentiate its enterprise tools from OpenAI and Anthropic?
