Meta Launches Muse for Small Business: AI Agent Connects to Shopify, Slack, QuickBooks and Other Business Tools

What happened

Meta announced Muse for Small Business in its official newsroom. According to Meta, Muse is a personal AI agent, meaning an AI assistant that carries out tasks on your behalf rather than only answering questions. It launched earlier this month and is available in the US and Canada. This update adds a set of new skills and connectors (links that let Muse work with other apps a business already uses), so users can give Muse a goal, such as running their business or finding new customers, and have it help carry that out.

Meta said small businesses have been growing on its apps for nearly two decades, and that business owners say what they lack is time, not ideas. Meta cited the owner of a grocery store in Iowa who works about 65 hours a week and hopes to hand some of that work to Muse.

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Which tools Muse connects to and what it can do

According to Meta, supported tools include Asana, Box, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, Granola, HighLevel, Intuit QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Lovable, Notion, Shopify, Slack, Stripe and Zoom, as well as Facebook and Instagram business accounts. Meta says that once Muse is connected to Instagram professional account analytics, a Facebook Page and a Meta ads account, it can understand what a business sells, its brand voice and what customers frequently ask.

Meta also says Muse supports custom connectors for services it does not support yet, and the full list of available connectors can be viewed in the Muse app settings. Example uses Meta shared include:

• Analyzing a full year of sales, ad campaigns and social performance to build next year's growth plan.
• Pulling together items that need attention from email, calendars and more.
• Analyzing ad and content performance and drafting a campaign for next week.
• Reviewing the month's financial performance and flagging spending that looks unusual.

Meta also says Muse will proactively make suggestions, such as flagging emails that need a reply and writing first drafts.

Why it matters

TechCrunch reports that Meta is betting an AI agent with context on a company's entire operations will be more useful than a standalone chatbot, as it continues to compete with rivals such as OpenAI and Google. TechCrunch also reports that the day before this launch, Meta unveiled the Meta Enterprise Platform, aimed at bringing products such as Muse, Meta Business Agent, the Muse API and Muse Code to businesses and developers.

TechCrunch further reports that after its launch, Muse topped the app charts in the US and Canada, ahead of ChatGPT. Meta says more connectors and skills will roll out in the coming months.

Practical impact for shop owners and users

For small shops, the appeal of this kind of AI agent is bringing together sales, accounting, customer and social data scattered across different tools so the AI can help organize it and draft content. However, the more tools you connect, the broader the data the AI can access, including books and customer records. Before deciding whether to use it, a safer approach is to understand what data each connector will be authorized to access, keep the habit of approving actions one by one, and review connected services regularly.

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