Meta’s Muse is popular, but personal agents still face barriers to adoption

Meta’s fuzzy-looking personal AI agent Muse is apparently getting tried out—a lot.

The personal AI agent has seen more than 10 million users in the US and Canada in the month and a half since the tool first rolled out, Mark Zuckerberg said during Meta’s Q3 earnings call on Wednesday.

Among the over 10 million Muse users, roughly a quarter of them are using it daily, Zuckerberg said during the call. According to data from Sensor Tower reported by TechCrunch, the agent’s 14-day retention rate clocked in at 23%, compared to 16% on average for rivals including ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude.

While the early data is positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean personal agents will necessarily be adopted widely in the future, Eric Schmitt, Gartner VP analyst, told Marketing Brew. While companies seek to reshape online shopping via agents, there are still obstacles, including widespread lack of trust among consumers, that could stall broader adoption.

“We’re still in the ‘too soon to tell’ stage with respect to the question of how broadly and deeply agentic shopping will be adopted by the mass market, by consumers,” he said.

Talk shop: So far, shopping is the biggest use case for Muse, Zuckerberg said on the call. Over 25% of users used their Muse agent to shop; the average purchase size of purchases on Muse, he noted, was above $200.

While agents like Muse are starting to impact consumer journeys, there are barriers to adoption, such as consumer trust, Schmitt said. Providing an agent with “unfettered access” to credit cards or other sensitive information is just one concern, he noted. Consumers, he added, also need to “trust that the decisions made by the agents” are sound.

“It won’t take much buyer’s remorse to sour people on the experience,” Schmitt said.

According to recent survey data from Feedvisor reported on by Retail Brew, while more than 15% of consumers said they use ChatGPT to research products, substantially fewer—10%—reported using the platform to make a purchase.

Negative public sentiment toward data centers and AI in general could also impact consumer enthusiasm for agents, Schmitt said. But there’s another, simpler reason: many consumers, he said, enjoy the act of shopping the old-fashioned way.

Final musings: While it remains to be seen if Muse will attain further consistent adoption, it’s arguably a win for Meta for the moment, Schmitt added.

“Muse appears to be doing better than the metaverse, so that’s something,” he said.