Meta opens personal agents battle: Muses assistant controls computers and manages purchases from glasses

Mark Zuckerberg opened Meta's annual Connect conference in Menlo Park with an explicit announcement that places the full weight of Meta behind its new smart agent Muses, just weeks after its launch in early September. The bet, which Zuckerberg described as the company's largest consumer investment to date, hinges on turning the digital assistant into a fully integrated agent that connects directly to users' apps and daily accounts, relying on the multimodal model Muses Spark designed to perform autonomous tasks, and with a pricing model that offers billions of tokens for free, after which the company will later take small fees from commercial transactions executed through it.

The technical upgrades unveiled by the company included giving the agent a digital embodiment called Julie, via a new computing model dedicated to real-time interactive images that lets the user converse with its avatar by voice and video, along with its direct integration into Meta's smart glasses in the coming months.The agent will run in the background with a voice call.It will track workouts, log meals, schedule appointments, and make instant purchases the moment products appear through the glasses' lenses, then return to alert its owner when the task is complete without requiring continuous real-time interaction.

On the productivity front, Alexander Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, revealed that the agent's capabilities will be brought to Mac computers, allowing it to run any desktop application on behalf of the user, whether to manage startup project tasks or handle deferred work after the device is left. To bolster this autonomous flow, the company developed a feature that gives the agent its own email address, so it can be included in message threads or receive direct messages and act on them according to the permissions granted.

The commercial axis focused on a broad connectivity network that includes Stripe and Shopify platforms, enabling the agent to browse store catalogs and make autonomous purchases through payment services such as Shop Pay and PayPal, as well as integrations with major retail stores and travel and productivity services including GitHub and Notion. The company also opened a gateway for external connector development for developers and small companies, receiving over 1,500 requests in less than a week to establish a presence on the new platform.

This shift carries a clear operational meaning for anyone running an e-commerce store or building tech products in the Gulf, Egypt, or the Levant. When purchasing and selection decisions are delegated to algorithms that browse catalogs via APIs instead of human users scrolling landing pages, the rules of digital optimisation change fundamentally, with software and marketing teams prioritising ready-to-use integration interfaces and structured product data for autonomous agents rather than visual design alone. Moreover, enabling connector building opens an immediate time window for developers and local platforms to link delivery services and regional digital wallets to the agent ecosystem before global standards settle and enforce closed pathways that are hard to modify.