After Meta held its Connect 2026 conference, Bank of America maintained its "Buy" rating on the company and kept its price target at $810.
The bank believes that Meta's newly launched personal AI assistant Muse is becoming the core product of the company's consumer AI strategy, and as Muse gradually integrates into Meta's existing apps, smart glasses, and third-party services such as shopping and travel, its commercialization path is becoming clearer.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted Muse during his Connect 2026 keynote, positioning it as an important step in the company's push to popularize "personal intelligence." The company said Muse has received strong initial consumer usage feedback since launch, and the next phase is to expand the AI assistant into more products and real-world consumer scenarios.
Muse Begins Connecting to External Services Like Shopping and Travel
Meta announced a group of important partners for Muse this time, including Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify, Expedia, and Instacart. These partnerships mean that in the future, Muse may not only answer questions or generate content, but could directly help users complete product searches, shopping, travel bookings, and lifestyle services.
For Meta, this step is very important. In the past, the company's core business model mainly relied on Facebook and Instagram advertising, but if a personal AI assistant can directly intervene in the user transaction process, it could create a new revenue source beyond advertising. For example, users can use Muse to find products, compare options, and further complete purchases. As the number of merchants and service platforms connected increases, Meta can further turn the AI assistant from an information gateway into a transaction gateway.
Meta Plans to Commercialize Muse Through Transaction Commissions
Meta has made clear one of the main future monetization methods for Muse, namely charging a certain percentage commission on transactions completed through the AI assistant. The company has not yet officially set a specific commission rate, but the business model is basically determined: when Muse helps users complete shopping or other commercial transactions, Meta earns a certain amount of revenue from the transaction.
This makes Muse's commercialization logic different from traditional digital advertising. The advertising business relies on businesses paying for traffic and exposure, while Muse has the opportunity to directly participate in the final transaction and take a share of the transaction value. If in the future a large number of product purchases, travel bookings, and local lifestyle services begin to be completed through AI assistants, transaction commissions could become one of Meta's new revenue sources.
Bank of America Expects Muse to Cover All Meta Products
Bank of America expects that Meta will ultimately integrate Muse into all of its major products, rather than running it as a standalone AI app. This means Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other Meta services may gradually connect to Muse, allowing users to directly use the personal AI assistant within existing products.
This distribution capability is an important advantage for Meta. The company already has a massive global user base, so it does not need to start from scratch to find users for Muse, and can directly use existing social and communication products to drive AI assistant adoption. If Muse can share user preferences and context across different Meta apps, its functionality may also develop from an ordinary chat tool into a more personalized personal assistant.
Smart Glasses May Fill a Missing Link in Meta's Hardware
Bank of America pays special attention to the combination of Muse and hardware, believing that the AI assistant may provide Meta's smart glasses with a core function that has long been missing. Meta is integrating Muse into smart glasses so that users can use AI through voice to complete tasks such as communication, exercise, and shopping.
Compared with mobile apps, smart glasses require a more natural and immediate form of human-computer interaction, and a voice-driven personal AI assistant can exactly take on this role. For example, users can directly ask about the product in front of them, obtain information, or perform actions without taking out their phone. Therefore, Muse's significance for Meta's hardware business may not just be adding a new feature, but providing smart glasses with a clearer use case. If the AI assistant can become the main interaction gateway for smart glasses, the long-invested hardware platform may also gain a more complete product logic.
From AI Function to a Complete Consumer Gateway
The key reason Bank of America is optimistic about Meta is that Muse is gradually developing from a single AI product into a platform connecting Meta's software, hardware, and commercial services. On one end are the massive user gateways provided by existing apps such as Facebook and Instagram, and on the other end are devices such as smart glasses, with Muse serving as the personal AI interaction layer in between. Through partners such as Walmart, Shopify, Expedia, and Instacart, Meta can further extend AI interaction into real transactions.
This means the commercial path of Meta's consumer AI strategy is forming a more complete closed loop: users encounter Muse through Meta products, Muse understands user needs and connects to external services, ultimately helping users complete transactions, and Meta then earns commissions from the transaction process. Bank of America therefore continues to give Meta a "Buy" rating and an $810 price target. Its core judgment is not merely that Muse can increase user engagement time, but that the personal AI assistant has the opportunity to become a new commercial gateway for Meta and further enhance the value of the company's existing social platforms and hardware ecosystem.
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