Sizing up Meta’s push into the crowded world of enterprise AI

Meta’s plushy new homunculus wants to pull up a chair in your office.

As the Muse personal agent/cartoon mascot gains traction among consumers, Meta is also making a play for the crowded enterprise agent market.

Meta has hired former MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to build out a new enterprise platform, as the company looks to provide services beyond advertising tools. It also announced a new Muse for Small Business tool that will integrate the agent into tools like Box, Figma, and Shopify, among many others. Details are vague right now on what an enterprise platform will look like, but Muse Code and Meta Business Agent will be among the already-existing offerings.

Business leaders and marketers we talked with said Muse shows computer use capabilities beyond those of other agents on the market, and could be more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses that already number among Meta’s advertising customers. But a wider enterprise play also comes with security concerns and wariness about Meta pulling in ever more data.

All roads lead to enterprise

Meta is certainly not the first company to try to parlay consumer AI momentum into an enterprise product.

It might not be an obvious enterprise tech vendor in the same way as Big Tech rivals that boast cloud arms and office software suites. But Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick said the social platform company is already seen as a growth partner by the millions of businesses that use Meta Ads Manager. On that platform, Meta has been rolling out plenty of AI meant to speed or enhance the creative and audience targeting processes, to some mixed reactions from advertisers.

“The question of whether or not you personally trust Meta with your data is a different question than whether or not your company runs business through Meta,” Winick told us. “For most businesses, the answer is already yes. And so this allows [Meta] to sort of bring together the frontier model that they’ve built with the enterprise relationships they already have.”

But Meta Ads Manager is not without frustrations for some advertisers and agencies that use it regularly. For Jeremy Schulkin, SVP of services at marketing agency Hawke Media, there’s the problem of Meta “grading its own work.” Would Muse ever tell business users that their marketing money might be better spent on TikTok, for instance?

“We have fought hard to not hand over the keys to Meta,” he told us in an email. “Connecting QuickBooks, Stripe, your customer list, and your email gives Meta a full view of your business.”

Diego Lomanto, CMO at AI enterprise startup Writer (which would compete with Meta’s new platform), said Meta needs to demonstrate some form of “separation between church and state” between its consumer data-driven ads business and its enterprise platform in order to convince companies to trust it with their data.

Still early

Some companies that have experience with Meta’s agentic offerings have found them compelling, if sometimes limited.

Jack Johnston, VP of social innovation and growth at marketing firm Tinuiti, said the agency has piloted Meta’s model context protocol (MCP) server, which connects AI agents to advertising tools. He said the new agentic campaign manager in Muse for Small Business leans heavily on the MCP and is good for small businesses that might be unfamiliar with Meta ads.

“Comparing it to enterprise or SMB advertisers that already operate in Ads Manager, it can be a useful guide, but it lacks some of the sophistication that may be required,” he told us via email, adding that he expects Meta to add more sophistication as it moves beyond small businesses.

Kevin Gosschalk, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Arkose Labs, which also advertises on Meta platforms, said he’s found Muse to be far and away the best enterprise agent that he’s used, in terms of its computer use capabilities. That prowess is also evident in Arkose’s web data, he said, which shows more traffic on the web driven by Muse since it started to take off with consumers.

Arkose is currently having its security team review Muse for enterprise use, evaluating whether it would comply with the strict data requirements of client companies like financial institutions. He’s hoping that Meta eventually creates a version of Muse that it can host locally, like Meta’s latest models.

“Muse currently is a cloud-based service. So anything you give it goes into Meta’s data centers. That, we’re not able to do generally in a workforce environment,” Gosschalk said. “But Meta itself has a lot of businesses that use their platform—small businesses and things like that—where they don’t have those security requirements I’m describing. There’s a big divide between those kinds of businesses and a company like us that works with banks and stuff.”

Meta spokesperson Kamran Mumtaz pointed us to a blog post in which the company said it designed Muse to have “multiple layers of privacy and security protections.”

History repeats

This new enterprise push isn’t Meta’s first attempt to sell workplace products beyond its core ads business. Since 2016, Meta had offered a communication platform called Workplace that was shuttered in May of this year.

“It was groups, it was internal messaging, and frankly, internal comms is a much lower priority for most businesses than growth and revenue,” Winick said. “This is targeted at a much more critical part of the business and working on much bigger problems than Workplace was ever intended to address.”

Still, it remains to be seen whether Meta can make a compelling case to businesses in a crowded space where its competitors have already spent years entrenching their own enterprise AI, Winick said.

“They’re going to have to make a strong case for why people need to switch or why the ad partner is the right person to build the overall business infrastructure,” she said. “They have relationships and they have a way in, but it’s not going to guarantee them the sale.”