Meta recasts itself around Muse at Connect 2026

Mark Zuckerberg used Meta’s annual Connect keynote to put Muse, the personal AI agent Meta had launched the previous month, at the centre of the company’s pitch, rather than treating it as one product among several. He said Meta was “building personal superintelligence into devices that you can take with you wherever you go,” extending the “personal superintelligence” framing from his August 2026 essay into concrete hardware and software commitments, and demonstrated Muse working hands-free through smart glasses — a user could simply say the agent’s name and have it act on whatever it was looking at, without a detailed spoken instruction.

Alongside the software, Meta announced new hardware: a third-generation Ray-Ban Meta with longer battery life and customisable action buttons, a lighter audio-only Ray-Ban variant, and a roughly 100-gram IMAX-certified VR headset branded Meta VR Glasses. Muse also gained a wider set of retail integrations, with Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Gap, American Eagle, Expedia and Instacart among the partners enabling the agent to shop, compare prices and book travel on a user’s behalf.

On revenue, Zuckerberg said Meta would offer a large free usage tier for Muse — 100 million tokens a week — with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month, and that the company’s main commercial plan was to take a small fee from merchants, not users, on purchases Muse completes, adding a commerce-based revenue stream alongside advertising.

The keynote marked Meta’s clearest statement yet that it sees consumer AI agents, rather than social feeds alone, as its next primary business, following the Secure VM architecture detailed at Muse’s launch and the open-weight and power-concentration arguments of Zuckerberg’s earlier essay.