Meta Platforms shares surged Wednesday, gaining roughly 7% to close at $653.69, a day after the company switched on Muse, a standalone personal AI agent designed to carry out real-world tasks — sending emails, booking travel, buying movie tickets and even negotiating on a user's behalf.

Muse launched in the U.S. on Tuesday for users 18 and older, reachable through its own app or directly inside WhatsApp, according to Axios's report on the rollout. Each Muse session runs inside a dedicated cloud-based virtual machine — what Meta calls a Muse Secure VM — letting the agent keep working on a task, like filling out forms or comparison shopping, after a user has moved on to something else.

The launch is the clearest attempt yet by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to convert Meta's enormous AI infrastructure spending into a product consumers actually use daily, following the sprawling vision he laid out in a lengthy essay on AI "superintelligence" last month, as Bloomberg detailed in its coverage of the announcement.

Wall Street Turns Bullish

Equity analysts moved quickly to reward the stock. Mizuho Securities' Lloyd Walmsley called Muse "a significant step" toward proving out returns on Meta's AI buildout, citing its "unexpected polish" and broad functionality, according to Investing.com's rundown of analyst reaction. KeyBanc held its $780 price target on the stock, while Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak pointed to Meta's built-in distribution across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger as a structural edge in what he estimated is a $30 trillion market for consumer AI tasks.

META'S MUSE CONSUMER AI AGENT MARKS THE BEGINNING OF A SUBSTANTIAL PRODUCT CYCLE THAT IS NOT PRICED INTO SHARES.

Some analysts went further, suggesting Muse could threaten Google's search business by intercepting consumer purchase intent before it ever reaches a search bar — redirecting the "I need to book a flight" or "I want to buy X" moment straight into Meta's own ecosystem instead.

Not everyone is fully convinced the rally will hold. Meta has stumbled before trying to turn ambitious initiatives — Facebook Shopping and the metaverse push among them — into durable revenue, and analysts caution Wall Street will want hard usage and monetization data before re-rating the stock further.

What's next: investors will be watching Meta's next earnings call for the first usage metrics on Muse, along with any signs of how the agent's cloud compute costs — each session runs its own virtual machine — factor into Meta's already-massive AI capital spending.