Mark Zuckerberg used Meta Connect to outline how the company plans to make money from Muse, its fast-growing personal AI agent. The plan: keep Muse free for 'a large number of tokens' and eventually take a small fee from transactions completed through the agent — a retail take-rate rather than a subscription play.

The commerce rails are already going in. Muse supports PayPal and has retail integrations with Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair and American Eagle, and it's expanding into travel via Expedia and grocery via Instacart. The fourth quarter — holiday shopping season — is the proving ground.

The pitch to developers is that Muse's mainstream, non-technical audience plus curated connectors makes it the consumer agentic-commerce front end. The open question, raised even on Meta's own engineering posts, is whether consumers will trust an AI agent with authority to complete payments — and how Meta prices the trust premium.