Meta says Muse has over 10M users, with shopping a top activity

Meta said during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday that its AI app Muse has been adopted by more than 10 million users, confirming estimates released earlier this week by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

But it is how people are using it, and how much they’re spending that has caught CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attention. Zuckerberg said about 25% of people who set up Muse now use it daily, helping improve retention.

He also shared that over a quarter of Muse’s engaged users who were shopping via the AI agent, had an average purchase size of over $200, which was surprising even to industry insiders.

“Plaid told us that they hadn’t seen activity like they’re seeing with their connector on any other service before,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the financial technology company that connects payment apps to customers’ bank accounts. Muse uses Plaid’s connector to enable agentic shopping.

Beyond shopping, Zuckerberg said other popular uses for Muse include personal productivity tasks, such as connecting the AI agent to users’ email or calendars. The exec stressed that this indicates users trusted Muse’s security setup, which includes a feature called “Muse Secure VM” designed to protect their data and privacy. He also mentioned that the forthcoming “Muse Confidential VM” will prevent even Meta from seeing users’ content.

Now that Muse has achieved “product-market fit,” Zuckerberg said Meta’s focus will shift to scaling the AI agent, increasing revenue, and optimizing its compute costs. Remarkably, the tech company is forecasting that Muse will eventually bring in more revenue per user than its “family of apps” users do today — meaning its users on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Currently, that figure is around “several hundreds of dollars annually,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta has said it ultimately intends to monetize Muse by keeping it free for most users, but keeping a percentage of the commerce taking place on the platform. Power users who want access to the most advanced AI models or more tokens will also have to pay.

Zuckerberg also noted that Meta believes Muse will be profitable after it scales.

“On the compute side, we are building out the capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years,” he told bankers and analysts on the Q3 earnings call. “In the near term, Muse is very compute-intensive to run, but we expect to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year, which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale.”

Muse will also play a central role in Meta’s smart glasses strategy. Reality Labs, the division responsible for smart glasses, VR, and the metaverse, is still losing billions.