Meta Is Dominating The AI Agent Field With Muse. It Is Now Seeking To Expand Its Scope.

Meta's AI agent tool, Muse, is dominating the new field in the industry. It has now announced a tool to serve small businesses.

On Tuesday, the company said the tool is expanding functions to that end, including connecting other tools. "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," the company said in the announcement.

It went on to anticipate that, in the months ahead, users can "expect more connectors, more skills, and more of the business handled" for them.

Should adoption be widespread, Meta would continue expanding its leading role in the AI agent field. That move has led JPMorgan to recently bet that Muse could become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.

Company analyst Doug Anmuth raised the bank's price target on Meta to $920 from $820 on Thursday while maintaining an overweight rating on the stock. The new target represents roughly 24% upside from Wednesday's closing price.

"Meta continues to move towards superintelligence with Muse off to a strong start, quickly iterating, improving, and expanding, with the potential to bring an extremely capable personal agent to billions of users," Anmuth wrote in a note cited by CNBC.

"While it is still early, we believe that Muse has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT," he added. That would represent a significant shift in the AI race.

While OpenAI's ChatGPT helped introduce generative AI to a mass audience, Meta is positioning Muse as something beyond a chatbot. The agent is designed not only to answer questions but to take actions on a user's behalf, including sending emails, booking travel, filling out forms and making purchases.

Muse, launched in the U.S. earlier this month, runs on Meta's multimodal Muse Spark model and can operate across a user's apps and online services. Meta says the agent can continue working after the user closes the app and seek approval when necessary before completing sensitive actions such as purchases or sending messages.

Within its first weeks, the agent has connected with thousands of applications, while Meta has announced integrations with major retailers and services including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora and Wayfair. At Connect, the company also highlighted shopping and payment relationships involving Shopify, Stripe and PayPal.

JPMorgan envisions a future in which tens of millions, and potentially hundreds of millions, of businesses operate their own agents within the Muse ecosystem. Instead of Muse navigating websites or calling companies for customers, transactions could increasingly happen directly between AI agents.