Meta's Muse AI assistant arrives on iPad

Meta’s Muse AI assistant is now available in a dedicated iPad app, the company said Wednesday — a milestone that took Instagram some 15 years to reach despite constant user demand. Muse hit the iPad just a month after launching on iPhone; bringing it there may have been easier than it was for Instagram, since Muse’s interface is largely text-based, where image and video resolution and formatting matter less.

Since launching on iOS and Android on September 8, Muse has topped 6.6 million installs, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The app, now one of dozens of consumer-facing AI agents, lets users connect their accounts to stay on top of email, meetings, and bills, and to complete tasks like booking reservations, ordering groceries, setting goals, and making purchases.

To do that, Meta has been adding partners that appear in Muse as “connectors,” which users can add and sign in to selectively depending on which parts of their online life they’re comfortable handing to an AI agent. With the iPad release, Meta updated that list with newer additions aimed at small businesses, including Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub, Klaviyo, and Zoom, plus connectors for Meta ad accounts, Notion, and Granola. Meta also recently added retail partners including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair, letting the agent shop those retailers’ sites and complete purchases on a user’s behalf.

Because the technology is still new, these shopping experiences can run into trouble when websites mistake agents for bots and block their access. On Tuesday, Meta said it’s working with industry partners on an open standard that would let personal AI agents identify themselves to businesses, which would help businesses tell good bots from bad ones.

Why it matters

As consumer AI agents race to handle real-world tasks like shopping and bookings, problems like websites blocking agents as suspected bots show the ecosystem’s plumbing — authentication, bot detection, and permissions — is still catching up to the ambition.