Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Media & Technology Conference held at Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, USA on July 9, 2026.
Brendan McDiarmid | Reuters
meta The deployment of the Muse AI personal agent has been well received by consumers and investors. In the two weeks since its introduction, the stock has soared more than 20%, propelling the app to the top. apple’s App Store overtakes ChatGPT.
But with CEO Mark Zuckerberg scheduled to take the stage late Wednesday afternoon at MetaConnect, the company’s annual developer conference, there is reason to be skeptical about Meta’s latest efforts to find a real and lasting niche in the consumer artificial intelligence market.
Meta touts features such as Muse’s ability to book appointments and travel, help users fill out electronic forms, and monitor home security cameras. They can also shop for you and search for and link specific products across different sites and marketplaces. Shopify Or pay with Stripe.
Amazon said no, and blocked Muse from purchasing products on the e-commerce app, claiming it violated its terms of service. Whether it’s other retailers taking similar steps out of concern about the risk of losing direct relationships with customers or consumers who don’t trust Facebook’s parent company with sensitive data, experts say the social media giant has a long way to go to turn its early momentum with Muse into a winning product.
“People will be very wary,” said Joseph Turow, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on digital media and privacy. “Some people are going to step into it, and some people are going to embrace it because of certain companies that they trust.”
Turow said there will be “early adopters” and then others will be “seduced by this” thinking they can find the best discounts and save money by using these types of private agents.
At a difficult time for the AI industry and meta, Zuckerberg is moving deeper into the agent AI market. human and OpenAI The calls for a slowdown in model development come amid growing concerns that advanced AI is spinning beyond human control and, if unchecked, could threaten humanity or at least amplify cybersecurity attacks.
Meanwhile, Meta Inc. last month agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle lawsuits brought by a number of states that claim the company misrepresented the extent of the harm to children’s mental health caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram. With the advent of generative AI and chatbots, both OpenAI and chatbots are making the problem of online addiction even more pressing. google The company is being sued by plaintiffs alleging that its technology causes harm, including suicide.
“Thoroughly protect relationships with customers”
Amazon has recently made it clear that it has no intention of launching AI services between itself and its customers. The company sued Perplexity in November, alleging that the startup took steps to “hide” its AI agents so it could continue to scrape retailer websites without authorization. Amazon also blocked OpenAI and Google’s agent tools.
Matthew Hassett, CEO of smart alarm clock company Lofty and AI-focused e-commerce startup Deliberate, which sells on Amazon, said Amazon’s “whole model is very protective of its relationship with customers.” “‘We respect the service provider’s decision’ is a polite way of saying ‘we don’t have it on our shelves.'”
“Third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers of other companies should operate openly and respect the service provider’s decision whether to participate,” Hassett said, citing an Amazon statement.
Mehta declined to comment.
Max Willens, an analyst at eMarketer, said the more consumers use AI agents like Muse, the more Amazon will become protective of its role in the “consumer journey.”
“For years, Amazon was the first place most U.S. consumers went when they wanted to buy something online,” Willens said. “Now, these consumers are increasingly using AI assistants to start their shopping journey.”
Beyond commerce, Muse has expressed concern that other industries could be handed over powerful capabilities to Meta’s new agents. stocks of financial services companies, including charles schwab Travel sites fell on Tuesday, as did LPL Financial Holdings. Reservation held and expedia It fell sharply on Wednesday.
For Mehta, early Muse momentum reignited optimism on Wall Street. The stock has underperformed most of its mega-cap peers and the broader tech sector this year. The post-Muse rally puts the stock up 13% in 2026, slightly below the Nasdaq’s 16% gain.
Analysts at Kantar, who recommend buying Meta stock, released a report on Tuesday with the headline, “Meta is racing while AI picks up pace.” For companies that derive nearly all of their revenue from digital advertising, the business model is not yet clear, they write, but the opportunity is clear.
“While we believe Muse’s unit economics are subsidized in the early stages, we believe META has several paths to a profitable freemium model,” the analysts wrote.
Analysts at Mizuho also have a buy rating on the stock, but MetaConnect said Muse has arrived at just the right time for the company to tie Muse into its AI story, particularly around wearables. Meta has never found a big market for its Quest-branded VR glasses, but its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s parent company, has seen a significant increase in adoption of its smart glasses.
“We expect Connect to shift Muse’s story from deploying apps to building a platform,” Mizuho analysts said Tuesday. “Perhaps the headline is Muse-on-glasses, which combines Meta’s fast-growing AI agents with wearables to create the clearest consumer AI use case to date.”
—CNBC’s Isabel O’Brien contributed to this report.
Attention: Meta Connect 2026 will be held on Wednesday. Here’s what you can expect:
