Meta courts small business with new Muse agent
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Meta is increasingly looking beyond consumers as it seeks to eventually turn its massive AI investment into a profitable business.
Why it matters: Facebook's parent is moving into a market long dominated by companies such as Microsoft, bringing its consumer AI agent and broader AI infrastructure to businesses of all sizes.
Driving the news: Meta on Tuesday announced Muse for Small Business, bringing its consumer AI agent to a new market.
- Meta is adding connector support to a range of tools often used by small businesses, including Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, Intuit QuickBooks, Lovable, Notion, Shopify, Slack, Stripe and Zoom.
- Separately, Meta on Monday announced Meta Enterprise Platform, a push aimed at selling its AI services to larger businesses. The company has brought in MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai, who will serve as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer and report to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (That news sent MongoDB shares down by more than 18% on Monday.)
Zoom in: Meta is pitching Muse as a digital operations layer for small businesses that often lack the time or money to hire specialists for every function.
- For example, a business owner can ask Muse to analyze sales, campaigns and social activity and develop a growth plan.
- It can also help manage cash flow and inventory, draft customer communications and create ads and other content, including by analyzing what has worked previously.
What they're saying: Meta has been testing Muse with businesses since before it launched publicly. About a third of early Muse users are already connecting it to some type of business account, Meta VP of AI products Vishal Shah told Axios.
- "People are using Muse to run their business," Shah said. "We're going to make it easier to do so."
- Tom Mulholland, owner of Mulholland Grocery in Malvern, Iowa, found out his store had been delisted from Google Maps because he missed an email. Muse helped him get reconnected.
- "I work about 65 hours a week, and there are so many things where I'm the only one who can do them," he said in a statement provided by Meta. "I need to free up time for the work that actually makes my business money: cutting the steaks, making the sausages. I'm very good at what I do, but that doesn't mean I'm good at all of the different roles a small business owner has to play."
The intrigue: There's not actually a separate Muse app for small businesses. As with consumers, the product is free for most uses, with $20-per-month and $100-per-month subscription tiers available.
- "The more and more a business relies on it and the more tokens they might use, they might hit some of these limits," Shah said, adding that the free tier should still cover "a lot of uses" for small businesses.
- Muse is also a part of Meta's pitch to larger businesses. But the company has yet to offer details on how that will work.
