Meta’s quick success with Muse puts consumers back in the driver’s seat of the AI trade
Meta Platforms’ personal artificial intelligence agent Muse is taking off, and it’s putting consumers back at the heart of Wall Street’s AI trade. Early adoption of the new agent is beating out competitors. Muse clocked more than 2.5 million global downloads in its first two weeks, surpassing Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini over the same time frame, according to Jefferies and Sensor Tower. It’s even surpassing OpenAI’s original chatbot ChatGPT in terms of iOS mobile downloads, according to a Tuesday note from UBS citing Apptopia data. Doug Anmuth at JPMorgan said Muse could become the industry-leading consumer AI app. “Muse has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT,” he wrote in a Tuesday note to clients. Jefferies raised its price target for Meta to $875 from $710, suggesting 18% upside from Monday’s close. META 5D mountain Meta 5 day. Implications for the AI trade The hit-making metrics are refocusing Wall Street’s attention on consumers’ use of AI agents, rather than use by businesses and enterprises, within the broader AI buildout. “I think the space has been largely ignored as everybody’s kind of chased enterprise AI,” Mark Mahaney, Evercore ISI’s head of Internet research, told CNBC on Tuesday. Analysts at UBS went one step further, saying Tuesday that consumer agents “may power the next phase of the AI trade” as a whole. “Meta’s Muse provides early evidence that consumer AI agents could achieve broad adoption,” Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi at UBS wrote. “This not only offers new AI monetization opportunities beyond enterprise application, but also underpins growing demand for computing power.” The JPMorgan trading desk noted Tuesday that Meta’s Muse is “putting a spotlight back on the need for CPU server demand – and INTC, AMD, ARM US Equity are leading higher as a result.” Chipmakers Intel and AMD curtailed earlier gains and were marginally higher on the day as of 11:00 a.m. ET, though Micron was up about 3% and Arm Holdings climbed more than 1%. The market for digital consumer spending that could be captured by agentic products is massive and multifaceted, analysts said. “We see roughly $30 [trillion] of consumer spend to be digitized through agentic offerings across online advertising, e-commerce, travel, food delivery, rideshare, etc…. so the dollars are real,” Brian Nowak at Morgan Stanley wrote in a Friday note. Frictions in e-commerce The rapid success of Muse is already creating some friction within the world of online shopping. Online shopping titan Amazon reportedly blocked Muse on its website this week, stopping it from becoming a personal shopper on behalf of its users and potentially supplanting Amazon’s own AI agents. “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.” Multiple analysts on Wall Street said they think Muse could increase app cancellations and software churn. “Streaming services and The New York Times are the most vulnerable to cancelations, in our view,” Bryan Kraft at Deutsche Bank wrote last week. “Muse could help users cancel services between major content releases or sports seasons, identify subscriptions available through existing bundles, and move to lower-priced tiers.” Muse’s success also calls into question Meta’s nascent cloud business , which it announced earlier this year as another potential revenue stream for its excess computing capacity. “It is unlikely given the success of Muse that Meta would look [to] rent out excess capacity,” Amit Daryanani at Evercore ISI wrote on Tuesday.
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