Small business takeaway:
- As AI shifts from emerging tech to everyday business infrastructure, Meta’s Muse for Small Business, an AI agent built to work across the digital tools owners already use, points to a more practical phase of adoption. The benefit is not simply automation; it’s designed to give lean teams access to capabilities they often lack, from campaign analysis and customer follow-up to financial review and inventory planning. Muse also reflects a broader shift in how companies will organize work: AI will handle routine analysis and execution, while owners and employees focus more on judgment, strategy, and growth.
On September 8, Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, unveiled Muse, a personal AI agent for consumers that can comparison shop for you, make purchases, send emails, book travel, manage your calendar, and handle other daily tasks. It quickly became one of the most rapidly downloaded apps on the Apple Store and is outpacing initial adoption rates for other AI apps, according to estimates by tech tracking firms.
Three weeks later, on September 29, Meta announced that it simultaneously had been working on a version of Muse tailored to specific needs of small businesses. Muse for Small Business connects with online tools and software platforms that businesses already are using, but leverages them to accomplish critical tasks and streamline jobs for business owners with AI-powered agents that can serve as everything from marketing directors to data analysts — for free.
Small business owners who have piloted the new AI agent have called it a “second brain” and a “great equalizer” that lets small businesses compete with big businesses.
Offering Meta’s 200 million small business customers a way to supercharge their growth
Diana Doukas, Director for Economic Opportunity at Meta, told CO— that Muse for Small Business is a way for Meta to “supercharge” its ongoing efforts to help small businesses succeed.
“My role for the last seven years has been to think about, day in and day out, how we’re using our tools and resources and products to best serve the small business community – and how are we bringing those tools to them and how we are making this work for them,” she said.
There are 200 million small businesses currently using Meta’s social media platforms to promote and advertise their businesses, and they give Meta a strong base to build on as it seeks to make AI expansion a top corporate priority.
Both Muse for consumers and Muse for Small Business are free for limited usage, but charge subscription fees of $20 and $100 for premium plans.
Businesses can use Muse for Small Business, Doukas said, to manage cash flow and inventory, analyze their financial performance, create a growth plan, create ad campaigns and assess how those campaigns are performing, and handle a wide variety of other tasks.
[Read more: Actionable AI Insights for SMBs From Top Execs at Wayfair, YouTube, Google, and LinkedIn]
‘Muse – what can you take off my plate?’
Examples of the types of requests a business owner can ask Muse include:
- “I’m underwater. What do I need to pay attention to from my email, calendar, news, etc.? Can you take any of it off my plate?”
- “How was my business’s’ financial performance this month? Find any expenses that look off.”
For businesses that are new to AI but are using Facebook and Instagram, getting started with Muse can be as simple as downloading the app and asking it: “Muse, what should I do? This is my business, here are my Facebook and Instagram posts. What am I missing? How can I improve?” Doukas said.
For businesses that are new to AI but are using Facebook and Instagram, getting started with Muse can be as simple as downloading the app and asking it: “Muse, what should I do?"
Muse underscores Meta’s big push to make it easier than ever for SMBs to build new businesses
Muse for Small Business follows the March launch of Meta Small Business, a companywide initiative focused on driving AI adoption by entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Meta’s heightened courtship of the small business community flows from Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mandate that in the AI era, “everyone will have powerful tools to create new businesses,” he said in a recent blog post. “People are starting to be able to manifest ideas themselves without having to raise money or build large teams. Many ideas that would have been too hard or expensive to try before will now be possible,” he said.
For one, Henry Bennett, the sixth-generation operator of Bennett Orchards in Frankford, Delaware, and one of the early business users of Muse, told Meta that Muse is taking care of the tasks that keep him from his most important goals.
“One day I’m an accountant, that afternoon I’m a mechanic, I’m the head of HR, I’m the head of marketing,” Bennett said. Muse, he said, acts as his assistant “to take things off my plate so we can devote more time to growing food, which is our core purpose.”
Live Bearded, a men’s grooming company based in Phoenix, Arizona, used Muse to look at 87,000 customer reviews and create an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the business.
“As a small business, we don’t have the budget to hire a data scientist, so this is data and analytics that used to be out of reach for us,” the company’s Marketing Director, Nathan Daggett, told Meta. Doing a similar analysis without AI assistance “would have taken me months,” he said. “Muse did it in a few minutes.”
Meta, when it launched Muse for Small Business, listed more than a dozen B2B tech platforms it has partnered with to allow Muse to connect with and utilize those platforms. They include workplace messaging and collaboration platform Slack, design platforms Canva and Figma, financial management platform Intuit QuickBooks, and payments platform Stripe, among others.
[Read more: Actionable AI Insights for SMBs From Top Execs at Wayfair, YouTube, Google, and LinkedIn]
Analyst: Muse makes AI accessible for small businesses, but controls are needed
Muse has the potential to make agentic AI accessible to small businesses that otherwise would be left behind in the race to adopt AI, but it needs to be approached cautiously, Charlie Poon, Senior Analyst at Coresight Research, told CO—.
Small businesses without the capital, technical staff, or data infrastructure to build their own sophisticated AI agents can “simply plug Muse into the tools they already use – such as Shopify, QuickBooks, Canva, Dropbox, and Slack – to complete tasks by AI agents,” Poon said.
“For an owner-operator, having an agent handle tasks such as analyzing sales, preparing marketing campaigns, or reviewing business information could effectively provide additional operational capacity,” Poon said.
“Retailers testing their specific business needs against the capabilities offered by Muse might find that they no longer need to build proprietary AI,” he said.
However, Poon cautioned that while Muse has received a warm welcome since its launch, there are concerns about safety and security when assigning tasks to AI.
Small businesses need to be mindful about the permissions they put in place that allow Muse or other AI agents to act, Poon said. “Using an agentic platform without thinking through what permission to give could cause disaster,” he said.
Meta emphasizes that Muse only performs actions that human users assign to them, and that business owners can set boundaries on what the AI agent can and cannot do without checking for specific approval.
Doukas told CO— that Meta addressed privacy concerns in designing Muse so “it runs in its own isolated space in the cloud, so no other agent can access it.”
Businesses using Muse, in effect, download their own “virtual machine” and any data entered is not shared with Meta or any other entity, she said.
As Meta was preparing to launch Muse for Small Business, it offered the platform to selected small businesses across a range of industries and invited about two dozen of them to come to Los Angeles to meet with the Muse product team to give feedback, Doukas said.
Meta plans to spread the word about Muse for Small Business by sharing the stories of businesses that are using it.
“The way that we are marketing it is less about Meta and Muse,” Doukas said. “It’s about the voices of the people who are actually using it.”
CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.
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