At Connect 2026 in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg introduced Muse as an agent that can book appointments and buy products on a customer’s behalf, and unveiled a connector roster that already includes Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, Wayfair, and Expedia, with Instacart and GameStop being added. “The centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building is Muse,” Zuckerberg said, calling it “the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use.”

The framing is familiar Meta maximalism. The mechanics aren’t.

Muse, powered by the Muse Spark multimodal model and fronted by an avatar called Jolly, has crossed 2.5 million downloads since its early-September launch, per Sensor Tower, and sits at No. 1 on both the U.S. App Store and Google Play. TechCrunch reports Muse now has agentic access to the entire Shopify catalog through Shop Pay and the Lync connector, with PayPal support layered on. CNN notes the Walmart deal is doing real work here, since Amazon has blocked Muse from browsing its store.

The developer side is moving even faster. Meta received more than 1,500 applications for its connector platform in under a week. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang pitched builders on “a generational opportunity to start building for a new platform as it takes off,” describing agents that can “help you run your small business, or just get work done for you.”

For a local restaurant or salon, that phrasing cuts the other way. When Muse dials to book a table, the business that answers, confirms, and transacts wins the customer. The one whose voicemail picks up loses to whoever Muse ranks next in its connector list.

Hardware makes the pressure physical. Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) is available today at $449, Ray-Ban Meta Audio ships October 13 at $349, the $1,299.99 Meta VR Glasses arrive Spring 2027, and the roughly 2-inch OLED Muse Charm keychain is “planning to have this ready to ship in time for the holidays in December.” Zuckerberg described the economics plainly: Meta is “making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions.”

Every transaction is somebody’s customer. The question is whose.

Sources