Meta's New AI Agent Will Haggle With Your Business. Decide Now What It Gets.

Meta put out a new product Tuesday called Muse. It's a personal AI agent, which means instead of answering questions it goes and does things. Books the trip. Fills out the form. Buys the thing. Sends the email. And one of the jobs Meta lists right in the announcement is "lowering bills." It keeps working after you close the app, and it pays with your card through Stripe's Link, using a one-time card number so the store never sees your real one.

Most of the coverage is about whether people will trust Meta with their email and their credit card. Fair question. But I keep thinking about the other side of that transaction, because that's where most of the people I work with live. If a customer in Perrysburg tells Muse to "get my lawn service bill down" or "find me a cheaper place to get the brakes done," your shop is the one on the receiving end.

The haggling part

This is the piece nobody's writing about. A customer can now hand a robot the job of calling around, emailing around, pushing on price, and keeping track of who said what, and the robot doesn't get tired or embarrassed. It'll send you a polite note asking if you can match a competitor's quote. It'll ask to cancel the recurring plan and then ask what you'd offer to keep it. It'll do that at 11pm on a Sunday and again Tuesday morning.

So who answers that email at your shop? Right now, for most of you, the answer is whoever gets to the inbox first, and that person makes up a discount on the spot. That was already a problem. It gets a lot more expensive when the thing on the other end is asking a hundred businesses the same question and taking the best answer.

Take twenty minutes this week and write down two things. 1: What's the actual floor on your main services, the number below which you'd rather lose the job. 2: Who's allowed to say yes to a discount, and what they say when the answer's no. Doesn't have to be fancy. "We don't price match, but here's what's included that the other guy skipped" is a complete answer, and it works on a robot the same way it works on a person.

The booking part

The other thing to know is how Muse gets to you. If your booking software has a public connection, it'll use that. If it doesn't, Meta says Muse opens a browser and works your website like a person would, reading the page and clicking around. A few of the reservation platforms, Resy for one, have already told customers not to point agents at them. Most small business websites haven't said anything, because most small business websites haven't thought about it.

The test I've started doing with clients is simple. Pull up your own site on your phone and pretend you have sixty seconds to find the price, the hours, a way to book or request a quote without calling, and whether you're open Saturday. If the price lives inside a PDF, or the form throws an error on the second page, or "call for pricing" is the only option, a person might push through because they like you. An agent won't. It'll go to the next shop on the list where it could finish the job, and the customer never knows you were the one it skipped.

I wrote about Google's agents calling businesses back in August, and this is the same problem from the other direction. That one shows up on your phone. This one shows up in your contact form and your inbox.

Two smaller things

Your front desk is going to start seeing card numbers that don't match the customer's name and only work once. That's Link doing its job, not fraud. Tell whoever runs your point of sale so they don't decline a real order. And Link's purchase protections mean returns and disputes on those orders may run through Stripe instead of through you, so know your own return policy well enough to explain it in one sentence.

Second, it's tempting to sign up and turn Muse loose on your own vendor bills. It's a consumer product, 18 and up, U.S. only, and there's a free tier before the $20 and $100 a month plans kick in, so nothing's stopping you. Just don't connect your business inbox to it on a whim. I covered why on Monday with the ChatGPT writing style feature, and the same thinking applies here, only Muse wants more.

I don't think a robot haggling with your shop is a reason to panic. I think it's a reason to write the number down before somebody who isn't you has to guess it.