Meta's Muse shops and pays for you—31% would let it

Meta's Muse joins a crowded field: Amazon's Alexa for Shopping in May, Disney's conversational shopping assistant tests in June, and Uber Eats' Cart Assistant that turns a prompt or photo into a cart. Meta's own path here was costly. After Llama 4 was widely panned, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, brought in cofounder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer, and committed hundreds of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure. Muse runs on Muse Spark, which the company's own results place in the race without consistently beating OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The consumer picture Muse walks into is mixed. AI-assistant traffic to retail sites rose 693.4% during the 2025 holiday season and online holiday spending hit a record $257.8 billion, up 6.8% from the previous year, per Reuters. But in the Vogue Business survey, 72% said they would not share card details and only 2% said AI consistently understood their personal style—suggesting shoppers want help narrowing options, not an agent deciding for them.

Meta's edge is memory: years of what users watch, follow, save and share. The company says users control which apps connect, can disconnect anytime, and can opt out of AI training, and that Muse conversations are not shared with its ad systems. Those safeguards must contend with a record $5 billion FTC penalty in 2019 over Facebook privacy allegations. Whether Muse becomes useful or intrusive likely hinges on whether shoppers accept that trade-off—and on Meta respecting the opt-out controls it has promised.