Meta's Muse gives Zuckerberg another shot at building a real platform

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Jeff Chiu/AP Meta's AI agent Muse dominates the App Store, surpassing ChatGPT in downloads. Muse offers a potential new platform for developers, attracting services such as Shopify and Stripe. Muse competes with other AI agents for the "top of the funnel." Meta's new personal AI agent, Muse, gives Mark Zuckerberg another chance to build the kind of technology platform he has chased for years. Muse jumped to the top of the App Store last week and remained the most downloaded free app on Monday, beating ChatGPT. If enough people use Muse as their main way to get things done online, developers could flock to the nascent platform, and businesses may have little choice but to engage with it. Meta surged 11% on Monday, getting the stock within striking distance of a record it hit last summer. Investors appear to be betting the company has found a new way to sit between consumers and the businesses trying to reach them. This broad idea has been driving Zuckerberg for years. Meta spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build the next major computing platform through virtual reality and, more recently, smart glasses. Part of that ambition came into focus in 2021 when Apple made it harder for Meta to track people across apps and target ads, reminding Zuckerberg how much power platform owners have over companies that depend on them. Developers invited Muse offers a different path. Its swift climb up the app charts gives Meta the kind of early consumer momentum that attracts developers. Last week, the company opened Muse to outside developers through a new connector platform that lets businesses plug their services directly into the AI agent. Those connectors help Muse do useful work on a person's behalf. A travel service can book flights. A calendar app can manage appointments. An email service can send messages. Developers can create their own Muse connectors and submit them to Meta's agent platform for review. No coincidence: The company describes this in very similar terms to how Apple guards its mobile platform. "We'll review your connector for functional, security, and legal requirements, and complete end to end testing," Meta wrote on the Muse developer website. "Once approved, users will be able to find your connector in Muse. Editors will review connectors for featured placement." Adding to the allure for developers: On Monday, Shopify announced support for shopping on Muse through its Shop Pay service, sparking a jump in Shopify stock. Meanwhile, Stripe is providing the payment technology that lets Muse complete purchases across much of the web. Top of the funnel The platform strategy is tried and true, but difficult to pull off. If millions of people begin asking Muse to shop, book appointments, compare products, and manage subscriptions, businesses will increasingly want their services available through the agent. That is how internet platforms become valuable. By controlling the starting point of online activity — the top of the funnel — they can become very powerful and lucrative. Google Search is one of the most profitable businesses in internet history because it became the starting point for finding information online and taking valuable actions afterward. Apple's App Store became indispensable because developers wanted access to hundreds of millions of iPhone users. In both cases, businesses adapted because that was where the customers were. Meta hopes Muse can become a similar starting point. "Being early could be as valuable as being early to the App Store in 2009," tech entrepreneur Greg Isenberg wrote on X. "Every business will need an agent strategy, just like every business needed a mobile strategy." He thinks Muse connectors could become "the new app listings," with businesses competing for visibility inside AI agents instead of app stores or search results. In that world, a company's API could become more important than its app because AI agents, not people, would increasingly decide which services to use, he explained. Amazon blocks, Shopify embraces Whether Meta gets there is far from certain. Amazon has already blocked Muse from parts of its shopping site, showing that some companies may resist handing customer relationships to another tech giant. That's a stark contrast to Shopify's reaction to Muse. And it shows the potential risk of not engaging with a potential new platform like this. If millions of users embrace Muse, Amazon could miss out on selling to this large customer base. For instance, Amazon could just as easily block Google Search from its online store, too. But it doesn't because Google is used by billions of consumers to search for products. "If Instacart embraces agents while Amazon blocks them, the agent will increasingly route demand to Instacart. Customers will be happy, and Amazon will eventually face the dilemma: keep protecting the relationship, or match the better value proposition," Nicolas Bustamante, who works on AI at Microsoft, wro