Meta’s Muse Has 10 Million Users—Now It Must Prove They Will Trust It
Meta’s Muse Has 10 Million Users—Now It Must Prove They Will Trust It
Muse launched in September with a familiar Meta advantage: access to an enormous audience and the marketing muscle to reach it. Within its first 40 days, the AI companion logged 10.9 million downloads, including 10.2 million in the US—putting it among only a dozen apps to cross that threshold so quickly. Sensor Tower said Meta devoted 39% of its October advertising spending to Muse, while the app’s early retention outpaced rivals including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.
By Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the US and Canada had set up Muse. Meta’s preferred reading of that traction is not merely downloads, but habit: roughly a quarter of users return daily, he said, and shopping has become the dominant use case. More than a quarter of users are making purchases through Muse, with an average transaction above $200.
That is the foundation for Meta’s larger wager. The company intends to keep Muse free for most consumers, collecting fees from transactions while also offering paid subscriptions and services for small businesses. Zuckerberg wants the agent to move beyond one-to-one assistance into a “Muse network,” where users’ agents can deal with relatives’ agents and merchants’ agents. “It’s not just navigating to that business’s website; it’s talking to their agent,” he said.
But the speed of adoption does not settle the central question: whether people will hand over the email, calendar and financial access that makes the agent useful. Forrester analyst Kate Winick said the crucial variable is consumer trust, noting that “overall trust in Meta remains low.”
Meta also faces a costly scaling problem. Zuckerberg says the service is too compute-intensive for a global rollout and has promised to improve efficiency by more than 10 times next year. “Everyone is just going to have to adapt,” CFO Susan Li said when pressed on business resistance. For Meta, that is confidence. For skeptics, it sounds more like a demand than an answer.
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