Meta brings Muse to iPad with new tools for small businesses

Your iPad already has your inbox, shopping tabs, and unfinished to-do list. Now Meta wants to put an AI agent in charge of making some progress on them.

Meta’s Muse is now available on iPad, as announced in an Oct. 7 Threads post, following its Sept. 8 mobile debut. The free app’s latest update adds iPad support alongside more connections to the services people use for work and everyday tasks.

If you’ve missed Muse’s arrival, the pitch is an agentic AI assistant that can help you complete a variety of everyday tasks, such as booking reservations, ordering groceries, managing appointments, and making purchases. Users choose which accounts to connect, giving the agent access to particular parts of their digital lives.

There’s already considerable interest. Muse has surpassed an estimated 6.6 million installs.

An AI assistant with business ambitions

The update also makes Meta’s small-business ambitions pretty clear. Its App Store release notes list connectors for Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub, Klaviyo, Zoom, and Meta ad accounts, plus Granola and Notion.

Mashable Light Speed

Meta says users can give Muse a business goal and have it plan marketing content, build client pitches, and create product pages, with their approval. The company announced its small-business push on Sept. 29. That’s a fairly ambitious job description for an app that’s barely a month old.

Shopping is another part of the push. Meta announced more retail partners at Connect, including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair, expanding the places Muse can shop on users' behalf.

There’s a catch, though: Websites can mistake an AI assistant for an unwanted bot and block it. Meta says it’s working with industry partners on an open standard that would let personal agents identify themselves to businesses, but Amazon has already taken steps to block Muse altogether.

Handing an AI agent the keys to your digital life has already raised concerns.

As Mashable reported, one user said Muse shared his home address and arranged a Facebook Marketplace pickup without checking with him first. Separately, columnist Jason Aten alleged Muse accessed private messages he hadn’t authorized it to read. And on Oct. 3 Wired reportedly found instructions for Muse to compile profiles of users' friends, family, and colleagues. As Muse expands to more devices and services, Meta will have to make its boundaries as clear as its ambitions.

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