Meta's Muse walks to the checkout and waits for a human to press pay

Muse assembles the order and presents the total, a person presses pay, and the money moves through Stripe's Link service, according to Meta ^[3]. The agent does the searching, the cart and the form-filling, and the human authorises ^[1]. Fortune's account names no integrated retailer, no merchant fee and no revenue model for Muse ^[20].

Vogue Business found 72 percent of respondents would not share card details, which leaves at most 28 percent of them reachable for the step Muse's checkout depends on ^[9][16]. Fortune gives no sample size and no field dates ^[21]. The same survey put 31 percent willing to outsource shopping to an agent that knew their taste and purchase history, against 24 percent who trusted chatbot recommendations at all, so seven points more people would hand over the buying than trust the advice ^[7][8][17]. Two percent said AI consistently understood their personal style ^[10].

The demand data points the other way. Retail-site traffic from AI assistants and chatbots rose 693.4 percent over the 2025 holiday season, according to Reuters, and online holiday spending set a record at $257.8 billion, up 6.8 percent ^[5][6]. Fortune does not report how much of it arrived through an assistant ^[22]. That growth rate implies about $241.4 billion in the prior period, so roughly $16.4 billion of incremental spend ^[18].

Meta spent on data and talent. It paid $14.3 billion for 49 percent of Scale AI, which prices the whole company at about $29 billion, and made cofounder Alexandr Wang chief AI officer after Llama 4 was widely panned ^[15][19]. The payment step came from outside. Muse settles on Stripe's Link, so a retailer asking how an agent-placed order arrives is asking about Stripe's integration ^[3].

On this evidence Muse is competing for the discovery step and might get the payment step too, and the binding constraint is whether people will store a card. The counter-case is straightforward. More than half of the survey's respondents had never used AI to shop for fashion or beauty, so it records opinions about a product they have not used ^[10], and Meta is putting Muse in front of U.S. adults free, with years of what people watch, follow, save and share behind it ^[2][1]. Merchant-reported Muse order volume, or a card attach rate among Muse users, would show whether 28 percent is a ceiling or a floor. Meta says Muse conversations and data will not be shared with its advertising systems, and that users choose which apps Muse connects to and can opt out of model training ^[12][11]. Facebook paid a record $5 billion Federal Trade Commission penalty in 2019 over allegations it violated users' privacy ^[14].