Meta’s Muse agent is getting shopping carts it draws itself, with Instacart first, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. He wrote on X on 3 November that “Meta’s Muse is getting shopping carts powered by connectors” and that “Instacart is going to be first”.
Instacart’s own help center lists “Instacart ads” among the features not available for Muse orders. Advertising and other revenue was $331 million of Instacart’s $1,095 million third-quarter revenue, about 30%, by our arithmetic.
Business Pill · Distribution Advantage
A short explainer on distribution advantage: why reach decides which products get tried. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Muse or Instacart.
The key insight: Kaziukėnas reports that Muse will draw the Instacart cart itself while Instacart’s connector only exchanges data; Instacart’s help center lists Instacart ads among the features Muse orders lack, and advertising and other revenue was about 30% of Instacart’s third-quarter revenue, by our arithmetic.
Update, 3 Nov: Grok Bot is pitching its own shopping cards.Elon Muskposted “Grok @Bot improvements” at 01:05 UTC, quoting a 2 November video titled “What’s New in Grok Bot” by Matt Palmer, whose X bio says he works on “cursor & @bot at @spacexsi”. By our count, four of the video’s ten chapters are about commerce: shopping cards, product pages, order tracking and payments. xAI’s changelog for version 0.78.1, dated 27 October, says shopping with a Bot “shows products as cards with photos, rating, price, and store”, that “Buy now starts an order you approve”, and that “orders through a store’s connector pay with that connector’s own options.” The changelog does not say whether the Bot or a store’s connector renders the cards, the question Kaziukėnas answered for Muse. We covered that release on 29 October.
Kaziukėnas wrote that “Instacart’s connector on Muse will only handle data exchange” and that “Muse will render the shopping cart and other UI using Muse-native widgets”. He attached a screenshot he described as being from the connector’s docs.
The screenshot sets out the steps. Muse calls shopping.read_cart with provider: instacart, checks that the retailer_name is the task’s store, and then “pass only its cart_ref to shopping.create_shopping_cart_widget”.
It also tells the agent to “never build a cart from search results or raw cart JSON” and to “never substitute text for a widget that is available”. On prices it says “Cart amounts are item subtotals”, and that the agent should “never invent a final total”.
We did not find the full documentation page published on Meta’s sites. The passages above come from the screenshot in Kaziukėnas’s post, and they give no date for the cart widget.
Instacart’s third-quarter 2026 revenue of $1,095 million by reported line: transaction revenue $764 million and advertising and other revenue $331 million, from its 29 October results release. Instacart’s help center lists Instacart ads among the features not available for Muse orders. Shares are our arithmetic; the line covers all of Instacart’s orders, not Muse alone.
Elon Musk posted ‘Grok @Bot improvements’ on X on 3 November at 01:05 UTC.
What’s New in Grok Bot
00:14 Shopping cards 00:27 Product pages 00:39 Order tracking 00:53 Payments 01:33 Custom modes 01:52 Team Bot logins and setup 02:09 Share and find Team Bots 02:51 Connector asks in Slack 03:12 Contacts in Vault 03:31 Rapid fire
@mattyp posted ‘What’s New in Grok Bot’ on 2 November at 17:07 UTC, with chapters including shopping cards, product pages, order tracking and payments.
Update, 3 November: a Muse figure from AMD’s CEO
On AMD’s third-quarter earnings call, about 22:05 UTC, AMD chief executive Lisa Su said: “Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s DOTS illustrate how quickly personal agents are growing, with more than 10 million people activating Muse agents in the first six weeks.” The figure was given by Su on AMD’s call, to explain demand for AMD’s server CPUs, not by Meta. Our piece on Su’s CPU remarks is here.
Quotation from our own machine transcript of the call audio; time approximate.
What Instacart Says About Muse Orders
Instacart’s help center already has a section on Muse. It says “Muse builds your cart based on your request” and that “Items you add in Muse appear in your Instacart app cart in real time”.
Payment does not happen in Muse. The page says “You’ll be sent to the Instacart app to confirm your delivery details and complete payment”, and that the service is “only available to users in the US”.
It lists what Muse orders lack: “embedded checkout, loyalty and promo pricing, coupons, Instacart ads, pickup, replacement preferences, and browsing by aisle”.
The same page describes ChatGPT differently. There the user selects “Continue to Payment” and then “Pay Instacart” inside ChatGPT. In Claude the user selects “Checkout on Instacart” and is redirected to Instacart to pay.
The Retailers Meta Has Named
At its Connect event in September, Meta wrote: “To make Muse an even better shopper, we’re adding Walmart, Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, Sephora, Ulta, and Wayfair, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments”. That is 10 named retailers, by our count.
The same post said “when you’re stocking the kitchen, Instacart is there”. Kaziukėnas wrote that “There is a long list of retailers including Walmart that said theirs are coming soon, too”. Meta’s post does not say which of these connectors will use the cart widget.
How ChatGPT and Claude Draw Partner Apps
Kaziukėnas wrote that “This is different from ChatGPT/Claude plugins”, which “render the plugin’s visual output as an in-chat mini app”.
OpenAI’s developer docs describe that model: “The MCP server returns UI resources for selected tools”, and components “run inside an iframe in ChatGPT”. OpenAI’s docs also cover checkout from plugin UI and a “product checkout plugin” contract for ChatGPT.
Anthropic launched interactive connectors in Claude on 26 January 2026 using MCP Apps, which it described as letting “any MCP server deliver interactive connectors with a rich user interface within any supporting AI product”.
Shopify’s help page for its Muse connector, which carries no date, says “Muse displays text only” and that it “doesn’t display screenshots, product cards, charts, or tables from the connector”.
Instacart’s Numbers
In the third quarter Instacart reported gross transaction value of $10,528 million, up 15%, and 91.4 million orders, up 10%. Transaction revenue was $764 million, up 14%, and advertising and other revenue was $331 million, up 23%.
The same 29 October release said Instacart had agreed to be acquired by DoorDash in a cash-and-stock deal with an equity value of approximately $17 billion. The release gives no figure for orders placed through Muse or other AI apps.
As we read the docs screenshot, the split of work is explicit: Instacart supplies the cart reference and the products, and Muse decides how the cart looks and when it appears.
As we read the three models side by side, they differ on who owns the screen and the payment. ChatGPT runs partner UI in an iframe and takes payment in the chat for Instacart; Claude shows interactive connectors but sends Instacart shoppers to Instacart to pay; Muse, per the post and the help center, draws its own cart and hands payment to the Instacart app.
As we read the help center, the features missing from Muse orders, including Instacart ads, loyalty pricing and coupons, are ones that run on Instacart’s own pages.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, on X, 3 November 2026
“Instacart’s connector on Muse will only handle data exchange – Muse will render the shopping cart and other UI using Muse-native widgets”
Three Implications
FOR RETAILERS Meta named 10 retailers it is adding, including Walmart and Best Buy, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments; Kaziukėnas wrote that a long list of retailers including Walmart said theirs are coming soon.
FOR INSTACART Instacart reported $331 million of advertising and other revenue in the third quarter, up 23%, and its help center lists Instacart ads among the features not available for Muse orders.
FOR DEVELOPERSOpenAI and Anthropic let connectors return their own interface through MCP Apps; the Muse docs in the screenshot have the connector return data and a cart reference for a Muse widget.
The framework puts it this way: “Pricing power leaves the model and lands on whoever controls the surface and its reusable workflows.”
As we read it, the Muse cart widget is a surface decision: by drawing the cart itself, Meta keeps the shopping screen inside Muse, while the retailer supplies data. The framework was published on 1 July 2026 and does not discuss Muse or Instacart.
What Is Not Established
Meta’s Connect post and the screenshot give no launch date for the cart widget, and do not say whether it is live for any users or which retailers will use it after Instacart. Instacart’s help center does not say whether the missing features, including Instacart ads, will be added to Muse orders. The 30% share covers all of Instacart’s revenue, not Muse orders.
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Kaziukėnas reports that Muse is getting shopping carts it renders itself, with Instacart’s connector supplying only the data. Instacart’s help center lists Instacart ads among the features Muse orders lack, and advertising and other revenue was about 30% of Instacart’s third-quarter revenue, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. The account of Muse’s cart widget and the docs passages are from Juozas Kaziukėnas’s X post of 3 November 2026 and its screenshot. Retailer names are from Meta’s Connect 2026 post; Muse order details are from Instacart’s help center; revenue figures are from Instacart’s 29 October 2026 results release. The 30% share is our arithmetic. We did not contact Meta or Instacart.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
