We are witnessing a high-stakes test to determine if modern consumers are truly prepared to delegate their entire retail journey—from initial product discovery and price comparison to the final checkout—to an autonomous artificial intelligence agent.

In a mere six weeks, upwards of 10 million shoppers across the United States and Canada have registered for Meta’s cutting-edge personal agent, Muse. Operating much like a dedicated human assistant, Muse functions quietly in the background to track items of interest, replenish household essentials, or map out travel itineraries tailored precisely to individual schedules and financial limits, though final purchasing power always rests with the user.

Commerce has swiftly established itself as the primary use case for Muse. Over a quarter of active weekly users are completing transactions, with average basket sizes surpassing $200, inclusive of travel arrangements. The platform's debut week generated such staggering transaction volumes that Meta was forced to collaborate with Stripe to hastily elevate credit ceilings to satisfy consumer demand.

Growth continues to be strong and we have been number one in the App Store almost every day. Engagement and retention are also off to a strong start. About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better that retention seems to get. - Mark Zuckerberg, CEO

This explosive uptake has attracted an expanding roster of commercial partners, including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Wayfair, Gap, Ulta Beauty, American Eagle Outfitters, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Michael Kors, and eligible Shopify merchants—providing a massive gateway for smaller direct-to-consumer brands operating on Shopify.

For merchants, Muse transcends the traditional definition of a sales channel. It establishes a novel pathway for consumer-brand engagement, reminiscent of how Facebook and Instagram once revolutionized product discovery. However, unlike social media networks that historically monetized eyeballs via display advertising, Muse generates revenue directly from completed transactions, with participating vendors remitting a fee for finalized sales.

In what could prove a revolutionary development for the agentic AI landscape, Muse is engineered to allow a buyer’s personal AI to negotiate directly with merchant AI systems, scanning inventories, weighing alternatives, and executing purchases autonomously.

The nation's preeminent brick-and-mortar giant, Walmart, along with a growing cohort of peers, has fully embraced this paradigm. Amazon, holding the number two spot, has chosen the opposite path.

How Walmart Is Managing Muse

To outmaneuver competitors like Google Gemini and Perplexity, Meta partnered directly with enterprises such as Walmart to formulate a Personal Agent Protocol. This framework ensures that consumer assistants can interact securely and reliably with corporate retail systems while preserving rigid safeguards for both businesses and buyers.

Walmart articulated why direct agent-to-agent communication is essential for the evolution of e-commerce, which was historically built for human navigation rather than algorithmic workflows.

“Today, agents may shop on Walmart’s site through a web browser, following steps designed for people. This can be slow and error-prone, and agents may get stuck along the way,” the company noted. “The way agents shop is different, and so we are building the Walmart Agent Gateway which will give agents a faster, more reliable way to shop.”

To power this automated shopping experience across Walmart or Sam’s Club, the infrastructure creates a dedicated Agent Profile. Here, the customer grants permission for their agent to authenticate into their account, execute transactions within predefined spending ceilings, or demand manual authorization for every individual purchase. These profiles also store historical purchasing data to streamline the selection of preferred brands.

To guarantee consumer security, Walmart has implemented rigorous protective barriers. An agent is strictly confined to actions authorized within the customer profile, can only access data strictly necessary for the immediate task, and is barred from viewing stored credit card credentials or modifying preferred payment methods.

Summarizing the architecture, Walmart explained: “Put simply, Agent Profiles give customers control over what their agents can do, the Walmart Agent Gateway provides a reliable way for agents to shop and our terms establish the rules that those agents must follow.”

The ultimate viability of Muse and its merchant integrations hinges entirely on consumer trust. Yet, Forrester principal analyst Kate Winick points out that general sentiment toward Meta remains cautious. “Customers almost expect to have their data mismanaged in exchange for a high level of connectivity and utility,” she observed.

Meta acknowledges this hurdle and remains confident in its ability to earn that trust progressively. Susan Li, Meta’s Chief Financial Officer, remarked, “As trusted integrations develop and agents demonstrate that they can generate incremental value and demand and operate safely, we expect that more and more businesses will be excited to participate.”

Amazon Draws a Hard Line

While Walmart rolled out the red carpet for Muse, Amazon slammed its doors shut. After formally requesting that Meta exclude Amazon from the platform, Muse still managed to bypass the restriction, prompting Amazon to deploy a strict anti-bot barrier that blocks the agent from accessing its search architecture, as reported by GeekWire.

Visitors utilizing the unauthorized tool are now met with a prompt warning: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customer have agreed.”

Amazon openly challenges Meta's security assertions, contending that Muse fails to properly identify itself as an automated scraper during browsing sessions and improperly caches user credentials.

This confrontation mirrors Amazon's broader defensive maneuvers against external AI entities like Perplexity, Google, and OpenAI. Amazon perceives these autonomous bots as an existential threat to its entire commercial empire—encompassing retail sales, targeted advertising, logistical networks, and Prime subscriptions. At risk is a staggering $588 billion in total annual retail volume, bolstered by $68 billion in high-margin advertising revenue.

Bain & Company cautions that agentic AI threatens to disintermediate the foundational relationship between retailers and shoppers by disrupting the very top of the sales funnel. Deloitte adds a stark warning, asserting that automated agents introduce “significant risks to margins, CRM data capture and brand loyalty” by eroding direct consumer bonds.

Rather than surrendering this territory, Amazon is fiercely defending its customer base. The e-commerce titan is cultivating its own native shopping agents, deploying Alexa for Shopping across its marketplace alongside a “Buy for Me” feature that lets users buy items from select third-party storefronts. Crucially, however, these journeys continue to originate directly inside Amazon’s proprietary ecosystem, safeguarding the customer ties that fuel its twin engines of e-commerce and advertising.

While Walmart is betting that incremental digital revenue outweighs potential channel risks, Amazon has far more capital at risk if third-party bots become the dominant intermediaries standing between merchants and buyers.

The Future of Retail Search

Agentic AI remains in its infancy, yet it is already radically transforming the retail lifecycle—from initial discovery and research to product vetting and final checkout. As Bain highlighted, “While timing and depth of adoption are uncertain, autonomous agents are already redefining the rules of search, advertising, personalization, fulfillment, payments, and post-purchase support. The choices retailers make now will determine whether they shape the future or are sidelined by it.”

Walmart has everything to gain by stepping into the arena early. The corporation recently reported that digital transactions accounted for 23% of its massive $125 billion second-quarter U.S. revenue. Unlike Amazon, Walmart’s primary strategic asset is its physical footprint. Its 4,600 domestic stores serve as the bedrock of consumer trust, granting the company immense flexibility to experiment with pioneering digital discovery channels.

Conversely, Amazon operates almost entirely in the digital realm, with Whole Foods serving as its primary physical exception. Its corporate valuation rests entirely on virtual customer intimacy. Exposing its walled garden to independent shopping agents risks fracturing that critical connection.

For years, Amazon has reigned supreme as the undisputed starting point for digital commerce. As of March, market research from Bain indicated that 69% of shoppers initiated their online product searches on Amazon, compared to 53% on Google and 33% on alternative sites like Walmart.com. Merely 8% began their journey on ChatGPT or other generative chatbots. Yet, given the velocity with which consumers are adopting Muse and competing agents, shopping habits may shift far faster than industry analysts anticipate.

Whether Walmart’s collaborative strategy or Amazon’s protectionist stance yields superior long-term results remains to be seen, just as it remains unclear whether Muse can sustain its explosive momentum. Meta has committed immense capital to the venture, projecting total annual capital expenditures between $135 billion and $145 billion, a substantial portion of which is dedicated directly to artificial intelligence infrastructure.

If Muse ultimately triumphs, it could entirely redefine Meta’s corporate DNA. Today, the tech conglomerate relies almost exclusively on advertising, which accounted for $63.1 billion of its $64.6 billion third-quarter revenue. Muse presents a viable pathway to capture value deeper within the e-commerce economy—transitioning from merely monetizing user attention via ads to directly sharing in the economic upside of the purchases that attention inspires.