Meta estimates that at least 500 million small businesses use its apps, and it wants to bring its Muse agent to them. On Meta’s 21 October earnings call, finance chief Susan Li said: “Based on a recent user survey, we estimate that at least 500 million self identified small businesses use Meta’s Family of Apps to reach customers and generate revenue”.
She called it “a significant opportunity to extend Muse to small businesses”. On the consumer side, Muse’s 10 million-plus setups, all in the US and Canada, equal about 0.27% of the 3.64 billion people Meta says use its apps each day, by our arithmetic.
The key insight:Meta estimates that at least 500 million self-identified small businesses use its apps, and Susan Li called extending Muse to them a significant opportunity; Muse itself counts more than 10 million setups, all in the US and Canada, about 0.27% of Meta’s 3.64 billion daily people by our arithmetic.
Li said Meta launched Muse for small business in late September, not as a separate product but as “a set of new skills and connectors inside the existing Muse app aimed at helping SMB owners” run operations and find new customers.
It connects to a business’s Instagram account analytics, Facebook pages or Meta ad accounts, she said, “along with dozens of third party connectors that businesses already run on, like Shopify, QuickBooks, Canva”.
Li said small businesses are using it for ads optimization, organizing direct messages, expanding their sales footprint, keeping their websites current with inventory and new products, and employee load balancing.
In her prepared remarks she said “Muse could help these businesses acquire customers and operate more efficiently while helping people complete transactions”, and that “over time, consumer and business agents could connect and transact directly creating opportunities around paid usage, commerce, and business services”.
Li also said Meta previewed a personal agent protocol, an open standard across Muse and Metabusiness agents that it is developing with partners she named as Sierra, Walmart, Stripe and Shopify. She said it is intended to define how “a consumer’s personal agent can interact securely and reliably with the business’s agent”.
Three reach figures Meta gave on its Q3 2026 call: 3.64 billion people use its apps each day, at least 500 million self-identified small businesses use them (a survey estimate), and more than 10 million people in the US and Canada set up Muse in its first six weeks. Different units, log scale, not additive.
The Consumer Numbers Behind It
Mark Zuckerberg said that “in just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse personal agents”, and that “about 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day”.
He said shopping is the most common use case, “with more than 25% of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200”. Li put it as shopping “being used by over 25% of Muse weekly actives”.
Asked whether that commerce figure includes travel, Zuckerberg said: “that does include travel too”. He also said Muse has not yet launched globally: “we have not launched it globally yet”.
What Olivia Moore Argues
Olivia Moore, a partner at the venture firm a16z, wrote on X on 2 November that “Muse for SMBs might be the most underrated story in consumer agents right now”.
Her case rests on reach. She wrote: “If Meta gives agent discoverability (preferred or not) to that SMB base, it could be a huge boost, especially for local businesses who can hyper-target users with urgent purchase needs”.
Moore also wrote “I could see Muse becoming almost a nervous system for SMBs that allows Meta to capture more and more of their activity over time”, and that Shopify businesses can manage their store in Muse via a connector.
One figure in her post is worded differently from Meta’s. Moore wrote “25% have completed a transaction via Muse”. On the call, Zuckerberg described more than 25% of Muse users engaging in shopping, Li described shopping use by over 25% of weekly actives, and Zuckerberg said the figure includes travel.
As we read it, the call frames Muse for small business as a distribution play: the 500 million businesses Li counts are already on Meta’s apps, so Meta is adding agent skills where they already reach customers, rather than recruiting them to a new product.
The Structural Read
As we read it, the small-business plan puts Muse on both sides of a purchase: Li described consumer agents and business agents that could connect and transact directly, and Meta already runs the ad accounts and pages those businesses use to reach customers.
As we read it, the gap between the two numbers is the open question. Meta counts the businesses in hundreds of millions, while Muse’s consumer base is 10 million-plus people in two countries, and Zuckerberg said it has not launched globally yet.
Susan Li, Meta CFO, Q3 2026 earnings call
“Muse could help these businesses acquire customers and operate more efficiently while helping people complete transactions”
Three Implications
FOR SMALL BUSINESSES Li said Muse for small business connects to Instagram analytics, Facebook pages and Meta ad accounts, plus third-party tools such as Shopify, QuickBooks and Canva, and that owners use it for ads optimization, direct messages and keeping websites current.
FOR COMMERCE PARTNERS Li said Meta is developing a personal agent protocol with partners including Sierra, Walmart, Stripe and Shopify, intended to define how a consumer’s agent interacts with a business’s agent.
FOR READERS OF THE NUMBERS Moore wrote that 25% have completed a transaction via Muse; Meta’s executives described more than 25% of users engaging in shopping, over 25% of weekly actives using it, with travel included.
The framework puts it this way: “The Container Moat โ built by closed data loops inside a customerโs environment, nascent but the deepest position in the stack.”
As we read it, distribution is Meta’s route to that position: connectors into a business’s ad accounts, store and books would put Muse inside the customer’s environment, starting from 500 million businesses already on its apps. The framework was published in July 2026 and does not discuss Muse.
What Is Not Established
Meta has not said how many small businesses have connected Muse so far, how it would pricebusiness use, or whether Muse would rank or prefer particular businesses when consumers shop. The 500 million figure is a survey-based estimate of self-identified small businesses. Meta has not given a date for launching Muse outside the US and Canada.
This Week In The AI Supercycle
Anthropic’s Reality Check, The Capital Squeeze, & The New World Order
This week’s issue: for two years the AI build-out was priced as a growthstory. This week it started being priced as a credit story.
Meta estimates that at least 500 million self-identified small businesses use its apps and calls extending Muse to them a significant opportunity. The consumer base it would connect them to is more than 10 million people in the US and Canada, with shopping the most common use, including travel.
A note on sourcing. Quotations from Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Li are from the transcript of Meta Platforms’ Q3 2026 earnings call of 21 October 2026. Quotations from Olivia Moore are from her X post of 2 November 2026. The 0.27% figure is our arithmetic from Meta’s numbers.
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.
