Meta has turned its AI agent Muse into a tool for small business owners. Muse for Small Business can now connect to a company's Facebook Page, Instagram professional account, and advertising accounts, pulling in analytics to help run and review social media and ad campaigns. On top of that, Meta added connections to fifteen outside apps that many small businesses already use, including QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, Slack, Asana, Dropbox, Canva, and Zoom.
The idea is to let an owner type a plain request, like asking Muse to review this year's sales and social media performance and turn it into a growth plan for next year, and have the agent pull the numbers itself instead of the owner digging through five different apps.
This did not come out of nowhere. Meta launched the consumer version of Muse on September 8, and it quickly shot up to the top of Apple's App Store, surpassing ChatGPT. One Wall Street analyst told CNBC he expects Muse to reach 100 million users within six to 12 months. Just one day before the small business rollout, Meta announced a separate enterprise AI unit for large companies and hired MongoDB's chief executive to run it.
Meta has an advantage here that Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI do not have in the same way: it already sits inside millions of small businesses' daily routines. 200 million small businesses can be found on Facebook, according to the company, and most of them are already running ads or posting content through Meta's apps. Turning that existing relationship into a paid AI product is a far easier sell than convincing a business to adopt a brand new platform.
The part business owners should slow down on is data. Muse for Small Business is being asked to look at financial records through QuickBooks and Stripe, internal conversations through Slack, and marketing spend all at once. Independent reviews of Meta's technical documentation found that the Muse Secure VM was never designed to make Meta cryptographically unable to read what's inside it, and instead relies on internal operating policies to limit employee access. Meta has said it plans a stronger, encrypted version later this year, but that version is not what is running today.
Meta also says conversations and business data are kept separate from its advertising systems, though sanitized activity may still be used to improve its models unless a user opts out. That is a meaningful difference from how Meta has historically handled personal data, but it still asks small business owners to trust a company whose entire revenue model is built on data and targeting.
For now, the tool is free for typical use, with a twenty dollar a month plan and a hundred dollar a month plan for heavier automation, matching the pricing Meta set for the consumer version. Business owners already on Meta's platforms will likely see Muse prompts appear soon. The convenience is real. So is the question of how much financial and operational data is worth handing to the company that also sells your ad space.