Meta’s AI agent, Muse, has been going shopping for Leif Abraham. With Amazon blocking the AI agent from placing orders, Abraham says that means fewer purchases from Amazon.
Abraham, the cofounder and co-CEO of investing platform Public, told Business Insider he’s turned to Muse to purchase 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 is Meta’s bet that customers will entrust AI agents to handle internet errands, like booking a restaurant reservation for friends or finding their next outfit. It’s an early hit, rocketing to the top of the App Store charts shortly after its launch last month.
On Sunday, Abraham posted about his Muse experience on X, calling Meta and Shopify’s recent integration a “win for Shopify.”
“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 added, along with a screenshot of him directing the agent to buy products “from a reputable store.”
Public, Abraham’s company, offers a Muse connector that lets customers link their brokerage accounts to the agent. Abraham said he has connected his own account and also uses Muse for daily brokerage updates and calorie tracking.
Abraham’s story is one person’s experience and doesn’t mean that Amazon has an impending sales problem. AI agent shopping has yet to catch on with the general public. But Amazon’s decision to block Muse from making purchases on behalf of users — Amazon raised concerns about how Muse accessed or stored customer credentials and sensitive data, along with account data scraping — risks leaving money on the table, especially if Muse shopping takes off.
Shopify, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach. The payment processing platform announced a partnership with Meta that lets Muse users check out at Shopify merchants through Shop Pay.
Abraham still labels himself an “Amazon mega user,” but says some recent purchases weren’t up to snuff. Now, instead of turning to Amazon for all his purchases, he uses the marketplace only for items that don’t require as much research, like toilet paper.
After Abraham wrote on X about the shift in his shopping habits, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke reshared the post and added that he’s “hearing so many of these stories.”
Not everyone’s experience with Muse has gone according to plan.
Abraham said several of his techie friends are also using Muse to find niche products, but results have varied. One friend, he said, is still searching for tickets to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” in IMAX 70mm — a task he said that Muse hasn’t accomplished. (Granted, whether that’s a Muse problem or a supply problem is a whole other conversation.)
