Meta has revealed its long-promised personal AI agent, which requires “no technical experience” to set up. Called Muse, Meta claims the agent is capable of performing a wide range of actions on users’ behalf, including online shopping, writing and sending emails, planning trips, and other productivity-focused tasks.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said he wants Meta to create agents that can work proactively to help people get things done, but in a more accessible format than other platforms like OpenClaw. Muse, which has its own dedicated apps and websites, outperforms the Meta AI assistant because it can handle complex tasks and work independently. “Once someone shares a goal with Muse, Muse helps them develop a personalized plan and coordinate their time and resources, then move the work forward independently,” the company explains in a blog post.
Exactly what Muse is capable of doing for you will depend on how much of your digital life you’re willing to give it access to. Muse can connect to Meta’s own apps, as well as a range of third-party services such as Google Workspace, Ticketmaster, OpenTable, Spotify and Apple Health. For example, you can ask Muse to go through all the recipe videos you have saved on Instagram and Facebook and organize them into a more readable format. And because it has shopping and browsing features, Muse can then create shopping lists, compare prices and order the items on your behalf.
Muse is also capable of establishing its own connections to third-party services if a public API is available. “Because it’s a very capable AI product that can also create its own software, it’s not really limited in what it can do,” Vishal Shah, Meta’s vice president of AI products, told Woozad. “From a complexity standpoint, you just have to get more and more comfortable giving him access to more things and also telling him what’s important to you, so he can be as helpful as possible.”
However, doing all of this requires a certain amount of trust in Meta and your agent. The company says it has built in a series of safeguards to prevent its agents from making mistakes and to protect user data. Muse will check for approval before doing things like sending an email or making a purchase, although it can perform more “low-risk” tasks without user approval. And behind the scenes, Muse runs on a dedicated virtual machine intended to keep each person’s agent and the data it can access separate from everyone else’s.
Even so, agents can be unpredictable and Meta says there will be some stumbles. “Muse can and always will make mistakes, but we expect them to be much less frequent and cause much less damage thanks to the safety systems we have built in,” the company wrote in a blog post.
AI agents have been central to Zuckerberg’s vision to bring “superintelligence” to the masses. And the company seems to envision a world in which its users constantly have a Muse agent running in the background, focusing on personal tasks and more “bold” goals. Meta also integrates the agent into WhatsApp and its smart glasses to facilitate interactions on the go.
Asking people to share a large part of their lives with a Meta AI product might be a difficult task for some. The company recently faced privacy backlash over its AI glasses and a controversial feature that allowed users to generate AI images from public posts on Instagram (Meta rolled back the update after public outcry).
On the privacy front, Meta allows users to opt out of having their interactions with Muse used for further AI training. And the company won’t share details of conversations with Muse with its advertising systems, although some interactions like purchases could “indirectly” influence the ads people see, according to Meta. It’s also unclear when Muse might require a Meta AI subscription. The company says “most of what people need” will be free, but those who want “to do more” will have to pay.
