Meta’s Muse is now calling small businesses. In the two weeks since its early-September debut, the personal agent has been downloaded 2.5 million times, according to Sensor Tower figures reported by Reuters, and it’s using that install base to place outbound phone calls on users’ behalf: booking appointments, checking stock, gathering quotes from shops, salons, and service providers that never agreed to receive them.

The wrinkle, revealed in internal company posts seen by Reuters, is that some of those calls weren’t actually AI. Meta quietly routed a slice of Muse’s outbound traffic through human contractors last week, extending the earlier launch of Muse as a shopping agent inside Facebook and Instagram into voice without disclosing the human-in-the-loop arrangement to the businesses picking up. Internal tests reportedly showed 95 to 98 percent call-completion rates with human involvement, against a lower percentage for the AI operating alone. A vice president in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit conceded in an internal post that starting contractor-placed calls without disclosures “was a miss.” A Meta spokesperson told reporters the company “will only roll it out when it’s ready and with the proper disclosures.”

Small businesses are the ones being called. One Meta employee, describing his own insurance company’s response, said workers “keep hanging up on Muse when they hear it is AI.” That’s the operational story sitting underneath the product story. A boutique that hangs up loses the booking. A salon without a protocol for verifying an agent-placed quote loses the customer whose agent placed it.

At Meta Connect on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg called Muse “the centerpiece of our vision” and told the audience Meta intends “to profit by taking a small fee from transactions.” He also previewed extensions to smart glasses and a Mac desktop agent, and a Muse connector program that has already drawn more than 1,500 developer applications in under a week, per TechCrunch. Named launch partners include Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair, the enterprise tier that has staff to answer the phone the new way.

Everyone else is now discovering, one hangup at a time, that the calling infrastructure of American commerce has quietly acquired a new class of caller. The businesses that answer it get the sale. Those that don’t won’t know what they missed.

Sources