Meta's rosy-cheeked Muse mascot, introduced six weeks ago, has attracted more than 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking on Meta's Oct. 21 earnings call, Zuckerberg said that this adoption rate is more than double that of Threads at its launch or of other AI apps. One-quarter of Muse adopters use it daily, and shopping is the most frequent activity, with an average purchase size over $200.
Demand for Muse was so high that Meta had to collaborate with Stripe to raise credit limits, though Zuckerberg did not specify by how much. Meta had partnered with Stripe to enable Muse purchases from the start.
Looking ahead, Meta plans to charge businesses a fee when Muse helps complete a sale. Using the agent will be free for consumers unless they want more tokens or advanced models. This offers Meta a potential revenue stream beyond advertising, which generated $63.1 billion in the third quarter. Zuckerberg said Meta earns "several hundreds of dollars annually" from each U.S. user across its family of apps, and he expects Muse to generate even more revenue per user as shopping activity grows.
Meta also envisions a broader shift: consumers' personal AI agents interacting with businesses' AI agents rather than navigating websites. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the company is working with partners including Shopify and Walmart to develop a standard called the Personal Agent Protocol, defining how consumer agents can securely interact with business agents. Li acknowledged adoption would likely be uneven among businesses wary of giving up customer relationships but predicted that when agents demonstrate safe operation, more businesses would participate.
The costly nature of running Muse is a factor in Meta's timeline. Meta spent almost $35 billion on capex in the third quarter, driven by AI servers and data centers, and reported negative free cash flow of $2.1 billion. Li said Meta expects full-year capex of $135 billion to $145 billion, compared to $72.2 billion last year. Zuckerberg said Muse is limited to the U.S. and Canada partly due to its compute demands, and while the company aims to eventually serve more than 1 billion users, it expects to improve cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year. He said Meta will work on monetizing Muse sooner than it typically does for new products, given the cost and the shopping already taking place.