Muse reaches 10 million users, with shopping activity

Meta said during its third-quarter earnings call that its AI app Muse has more than 10 million users, confirming estimates released earlier in the week by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. CEO Mark Zuckerberg also shared figures on how often people use the app and what they buy through it.

About 25% of people who set up Muse now use it daily, which Zuckerberg said is helping improve retention. Shopping has also stood out: over a quarter of Muse’s engaged users who shopped through the AI agent had an average purchase size above $200. The spending level surprised even industry insiders, according to the report.

Zuckerberg cited activity through Muse’s connector from financial technology company Plaid, which links payment apps to customers’ bank accounts and enables agentic shopping. “Plaid told us that they hadn’t seen activity like they’re seeing with their connector on any other service before,” he said.

The figures point to shopping as a notable use of Muse as Meta expands the app beyond its initial adoption. The company has reported both a growing user base and substantial purchases among engaged shoppers, while daily use among people who set up the app offers a measure of how frequently users return.

Users connect Muse to shopping, email and calendars

Muse’s shopping connector has drawn attention from Plaid, the financial technology company that links payment apps to customers’ bank accounts. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Plaid told Meta it had not seen activity like the activity generated by its connector on any other service. Muse uses the connector to support agentic shopping.

Shopping is not the only use users have found for the AI agent. Zuckerberg said popular uses also include personal productivity tasks, such as connecting Muse to a user’s email or calendar. He said this reflected users’ trust in Muse’s security setup.

That setup includes Muse Secure VM, a feature designed to protect users’ data and privacy. Zuckerberg also pointed to a forthcoming addition, Muse Confidential VM, which is intended to prevent even Meta from seeing users’ content. Together, the protections address the sensitive information involved when people connect an AI agent to personal communications and calendars. Meta cited these security measures as users put Muse to work beyond shopping.

Meta plans to monetize Muse and reduce its costs

With Muse having reached product-market fit, Meta says its priorities are to scale the AI agent, grow revenue and make it less expensive to run. The company forecasts that Muse could eventually generate more revenue per user than its family of apps—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—does today. Zuckerberg described current revenue per user across those apps as several hundred dollars annually.

Meta plans to keep Muse free for most people and earn a share of commerce conducted through the platform. Users who want the most advanced AI models or additional tokens may pay for access. Zuckerberg said Meta expects Muse to become profitable once it reaches scale.

That goal depends in part on reducing the cost of running the service. Muse is currently compute-intensive, and Meta is building capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years. Zuckerberg said the company expects to improve compute cost efficiency by more than tenfold in the next year, which he believes will enable profitability when revenue streams are at scale.

Muse will support Meta hardware and a social network

Meta is building the capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years, and Zuckerberg says Muse is central to the company’s smart glasses strategy. Those glasses are part of Reality Labs, the division responsible for smart glasses, VR and the metaverse. Though the division continues to lose billions, Meta expects those losses to decline from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $15 billion this year.

Zuckerberg also outlined a possible social layer for the AI assistant: the “Muse network.” He described a shift from using Muse as a “single-player game” toward a system where users’ Muses can work with their friends’ and families’ agents. That could extend beyond personal connections to interactions with businesses, too. Rather than simply visiting a company’s website to make a purchase, users could talk directly to that business’s agent, Zuckerberg said.

The plans suggest Meta sees Muse as more than a standalone app: it could connect users’ agents with one another and help support the company’s hardware ambitions.