The news: Meta announced several high-profile retail partnerships for Muse, its personal AI agent, making it the latest tech company to aggressively push into agentic commerce.

• Muse users can now instruct their agents to shop Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Wayfair, among other retailers.
• Partnerships with Shopify and PayPal will enable Muse to complete purchases on shoppers’ behalf.

The big picture: Meta’s decision to jump straight into agentic commerce is a big vote of confidence in Muse, which has scored over 2.5 million downloads since launching two weeks ago, according to Sensor Tower data reported by CNN. While early end-to-end agentic commerce efforts by companies like OpenAI and Perplexity struggled to gain traction, Meta is betting that Muse’s ease and utility will make users more inclined to trust it to purchase on their behalf.

Whether that’s the case remains to be seen, especially since a majority of people have little trust in Facebook and Instagram. Sixty-four percent of US adults say they don’t trust Facebook much or at all, followed by 59% for Instagram, according to a March survey by Institute for Public Relations and Leger. On that measure, ChatGPT and other generative AI programs score 51%, giving them a possible edge as consumers grow more accustomed to chatbot interactions and AI-assisted shopping.

Implications for agentic commerce: Even if users aren’t willing to hand over their credit card information to Muse just yet, the large number of early downloads suggests strong interest in the idea of using AI agents to handle tedious tasks, which could eventually drive greater agentic commerce adoption. Trust may determine whether Muse advances to true agentic commerce.