Meta Wants to Put Its Muse AI Assistant on Your Face - but Will Consumers Buy In?

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Mark Zuckerberg just laid out a bold vision for Meta Platforms, one that could see the company capitalize on the viral popularity of its Muse artificial-intelligence agent by creating links to hardware products like smart glasses.

It's a big new bet, Evercore's Mark Mahaney wrote in a Thursday note, but whether it will pan out isn't clear.

At the Meta Connect event late Wednesday, Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, touted Muse along with the company's new hardware products, including AI glasses, camera-free audio glasses and a keychain-sized device called Muse Charm. Muse is currently only available in app form, but the company plans to make it available in other ways, including through these hardware devices.

The company has had mixed success thus far in hardware. Meta's (META) Ray-Ban glasses have established the company as a front-runner in an admittedly niche hardware market, even before Muse. But heavier and more expensive virtual-reality equipment has been a tougher sell.

Don't miss: Big Tech is obsessed with smart glasses. Now it has to convince people to wear them.

While Mahaney believes that Meta has a unique opportunity to roll out Muse as well as its new wearable products to the 3.6 billion people who use its services on a daily basis, he wrote that Zuckerberg's keynote address on Wednesday wasn't "immediately actionable."

He believes that missing from the remarks was an update on Muse adoption. Mahaney was also left wanting more information about Meta Business Agents, which are AI assistants that help automate business and sales transactions.

Meanwhile, Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian remains "tempered" on the extent to which consumers will want to automate their commerce and transactions through an agent, as he wrote in a Thursday note.

"To date, consumers have been reluctant to move purchase behavior directly into chatbots," he noted. But once Muse is accessible in different forms, there could be shifts in that behavior.

J.P. Morgan's Doug Anmuth was more confident, writing that Muse could become "the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT."

See MarketWatch's live coverage: Mark Zuckerberg champions an AI device for every scenario at Meta's big conference

Meta on Wednesday night pointed out that the AI agent can now tap into "connectors" with Walmart (WMT), Best Buy $(BBY)$, Sephora and Wayfair $(WTI3)$. (Amazon (AMZN), notably, is preventing the agent from accessing its store.) The J.P. Morgan team said that over time, Meta should be able to monetize sales made this way through a take-rate or commission model.

Meta's plans to keep Muse free for the vast majority of users but to take a small fee on transactions completed through the agent, William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart said, offers a clear monetization opportunity.

"We believe this approach could create a meaningful new revenue opportunity over time if consumer adoption scales and commerce activity increasingly shifts toward agent-mediated transactions," he wrote.

Shares of Meta were up 2% on Thursday.

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