Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) launched Muse this week. The long-touted AI assistant, powered by its Muse Spark model, is aimed at customers and small businesses.
With the tech giant having spent billions of dollars making artificial intelligence better at recommending content and advertisements, the question now is whether Meta can leverage Muse to drive material AI adoption and monetization.
Evercore ISI thinks it can, seeing more than a 50% chance that Meta successfully rolls out AI agents to consumers and small businesses. On September 9, Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney reiterated an Outperform rating on the stock with an $860.00 price target.
What Muse Does
According to Meta, Muse is more than just a chat bot. The agent can not only work across connected apps, but also browse the internet, fill forms, make purchases with approvals, all while continuing working in the background. As per Meta, people can also opt out of their interactions being used to train Meta’s AI models.
In the company’s own words, it doesn’t just answer questions, but actually does the work. It helps people manage their work, turn goals into actionable plans, and even handle tasks that previously required manual work.
Muse is currently available in the US both as a standalone app and also through WhatsApp.
Evercore ISI is positive on Meta’s ability to drive material adoption and monetization for Muse based on its roughly 3.6 billion daily users and an estimated 15 million small businesses base that commercially reside across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
If even a modest share of this user base ends up adopting Muse, Meta could create a meaningful path for itself toward material adoption and monetization over time.
Meta is currently offering a basic version for free, whereas heavier users can subscribe to $20 per month and $100 per month plans.
Execution Risk
Even though Evercore ISI believes there is more than a 50% chance that Meta will be successful in rolling out AI agents to consumers and small businesses, that still leaves meaningful execution risk if adoption or monetization falls short of the firm’s expectations.
The tech giant reported revenues of $60.8 billion, up 28% year-over-year. However, costs and expenses increased 55%, operating income fell 8%, while operating margin declined to 31% from 43%.
While the 55% increase also included significant legal and severance charges , it also reflects that even though Meta’s AI opportunity is expanding, the amount of money required to pursue it does too.
Muse adds another risk, which is trust. Using the personal agent would require giving it access to personal mails, calendars, payments, and other sensitive information. Even though Muse is built around a dedicated secure virtual machine and separate safety architecture, customers would ultimately have to be comfortable allowing Muse to perform actions on their behalf.
Trust has been a weaker part of Meta’s brand. The tech giant has already been facing lawsuits regarding claims of platform addiction, child safety, and data practices. These concerns may make it harder for consumers to trust the new agent.
Hedge fund sentiment for the stock seems to be cooling as well. At the end of the second quarter, 254 hedge funds held the stock, down from 262 in the prior quarter. However, bears aren’t too skeptical of the stock. As of August 14, 2026, Meta had a short interest of 28.05 million shares sold short, representing 1.27% of the public float.
Overall, Mahaney’s note seems to be light on what share of Muse users could convert to paid subscriptions and whether the subscription revenue can outweigh the compute costs required to serve them. This makes the analyst’s estimate more of an investment judgment rather than a quantified thesis.
The case strengthens if Muse is able to monetize itself, and weakens in case customers only experiment and not subscribe, or if users consume more resources than their payments cover.
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