Meta plans to give away large amounts of AI usage and take a small cut when its agent completes purchases. Amazon has blocked the agent, but a growing list of retailers is partnering with it.
Mark Zuckerberg has explained how Meta intends to make money from Muse, and the answer looks less like a software subscription than a payments business.
At the company's Connect developer conference this week, Zuckerberg said Meta will make Muse free for "a huge number of tokens," the units of AI processing each request consumes, and expects to profit by taking a small fee from transactions the agent completes. Meta launched Muse with paid subscription tiers, but Zuckerberg's comments point to commerce as the larger bet.
That model depends on merchants letting the agent in. Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair have signed on as Muse partners, Meta's AI chief Alexandr Wang told the conference. Other integrations announced at the conference include Stripe, Shopify, Expedia and Instacart, alongside productivity tools such as GitHub, Notion and Granola.
"One of the great promises of e-commerce since the earliest days of the industry has been that it can save you money and time," Wang said. "Personal agents are going to continue delivering on that promise for a new generation of shoppers."
Amazon has refused. It has blocked Muse from purchasing on its site, saying outside agents that buy on customers' behalf "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate." A transaction-fee model makes that refusal more consequential, since every order routed through Amazon is one Meta cannot collect a fee on.
Zuckerberg framed the product in sweeping terms. "In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives," he said, describing the agent as the centerpiece of Meta's AI push.
The hardware announcements pointed the same direction. Meta introduced the Muse Charm, a handheld device for talking to AI agents by voice. It also showed Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses without cameras, priced at $349, and $1,299 Meta VR Glasses due in spring 2027. Muse can now run on smart glasses through a wake word, hold video conversations through a realtime avatar, and control a user's Mac desktop.
Some analysts see the merchant partnerships as evidence that Muse will lean on existing commerce infrastructure rather than replace it. Loop Capital analyst Dominick Gabriele said the market is "misreading" Muse as a threat to Shopify, arguing that agents will still need Shopify's product catalogs and checkout systems. By using those tools, he wrote, Meta is "relying rather than replacing" merchant infrastructure. Loop kept its hold rating on Shopify.
Investors have rewarded the strategy so far. Meta shares climbed over 20% in the fortnight after Muse launched, leaving them 13% higher for the year through Wednesday, a few points behind the Nasdaq's 16% advance. They added about 2.8% on Thursday.
A fee-based model makes user counts and transaction volumes the figures to watch. The first disclosure of how many purchases Muse completes, and how large Meta's cut is, will show whether the commerce business can carry a product Meta is giving away.