Meta’s new artificial intelligence shopping agent, Muse, has already pulled at least one repeat Amazon customer’s spending elsewhere, the co-chief executive of the investing app Public said, after Amazon blocked the tool from placing orders.
Leif Abraham, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Public, told Business Insider he has been using Muse to buy mostly niche, hard-to-find products: skincare, vintage wines, a German creatine product, discontinued Levi’s jeans.
“Since the thing came out, I’ve been buying so much stuff,” he said. “I literally just have to approve the payment, and that’s it.”
Muse, which Meta introduced last month, is the company’s bet that customers will hand internet errands to an AI agent, from booking a restaurant table for friends to finding their next outfit. It shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts shortly after its debut.
On Sunday, Mr. Abraham described the shift in his own spending on X. “The amount of purchases I’ve made with Muse that I used to have gone to Amazon for,” he wrote. “Now buying from the brands directly…” He called Meta’s recent integration with Shopify a “win for Shopify” and attached a screenshot showing him telling the agent to buy “from a reputable store.”
Amazon has refused to let Muse shop on its site, raising concerns about how the agent accessed or stored customer credentials and other sensitive data, along with the scraping of account data.
One chief executive’s habits do not amount to a sales problem for Amazon, and shopping by AI agent has yet to catch on with the broader public. But keeping Muse out risks leaving money on the table if that kind of buying does spread.
Shopify has taken the opposite approach, announcing a partnership with Meta that lets Muse users check out at Shopify merchants through Shop Pay. After Mr. Abraham’s post, the company’s chief executive, Tobi Lütke, reshared it and said he was “hearing so many of these stories.”
Public itself offers a Muse connector that lets customers link their brokerage accounts to the agent. Mr. Abraham said he had connected his own account and also uses Muse for daily brokerage updates and calorie tracking.
None of it has made him a former Amazon customer. He still calls himself an “Amazon mega user,” though he said some recent purchases had disappointed him. These days, he said, the marketplace gets the orders that require little research, like toilet paper.
Not every errand goes smoothly. Mr. Abraham said several friends in tech also use Muse to hunt niche products, with mixed results; one is still trying to get the agent to find tickets to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in Imax 70mm, a task Muse has so far failed to complete. Whether that is a Muse problem or a supply problem is an open question.