Meta launch Muse social media AI agent - what it means for brands

What is Muse?

Meta announced their Muse personal AI agent, which you’d communicate with in Instagram and WhatsApp DMs, and can perform tasks for you - planning a walking route etc. This builds on their Muse AI models, and fits within Zuckerberg’s vision of an agentic future. Initially available in the US, it will also have paid tiers for heavier users (in-line with LLMs such as Chat GPT or Claude).

Why have Meta created Muse?

The cynics will say it’s because Mark Zuckerberg is under pressure to justify Met’a huge spend on AI. As such, Muse has a lot to deliver on. It’s unclear whether it;ll be materiallly different to Siri or Google Assistant in how people use it. Those tools have modest real world differences made to people. Now Meta will tell you, not incorrectly, that this is different, those are interfaces, this is an agent. That’s where the real point comes in.

An ‘agentic future’ has been discussed, but isn’t here for the mainstream consumer. Meta are betting their scale, social integration, and speed to market could see them take a lead in a world in which Ai isn’t just a smarter Google, but it acts on our behalf, to our direction. Time will tell if a) people want that b) Muse is good enough at doing the agentic tasks c) Meta’s USPs around social context can see it succeed.

What do brands need to do with Muse?

Initially - nothing. Watch, play, learn. Not least as Meta has a decidedly mixed record on innovation, so heavy pivots based on product launches can be wasted effort (remember the Metaverse?!). 

As such, your best bet as a brand is to have a strong social presence, for the users context to be drawn from, to integrate functionality where relevant (e.g. payments / bookings etc), and to monitor how (if) consumers adopt and modify behaviours. Much like GEO optimisation, a lot rests on ensuring the right info and functionality is discoverable by the LLMs. Making consumers want to use your brand remains the same challenges they ever were - be visible, be relevant, be differentiated - only today that’s primarily going to be achieved through social influence, third parties and paid media. As is demonstrated by Meta leaning heavily into influencers like Casey Neistat to promote it…