Wall Street · NY Daily Wire
– This is the script of CNBC's financial news report for China's CCTV on SEPTEMBER 23, 2026. I am standing outside an Amazon office facility in Silicon Valley, less than a ten-minute drive from Meta's headquarters. While both stand as iconic American tech giants, their core business areas historically had limited overlap.
The release of Muse, however, has fundamentally changed that dynamic. As Meta's AI agent, Muse, begins searching for products, comparing prices, and even making purchases on behalf of consumers, it directly enters the heart of Amazon's core e-commerce territory. Just yesterday, Amazon officially blocked Muse from accessing its platform to shop for consumers, bringing a fierce battle over the future doorway to AI-driven consumer spending into the open.
This clash immediately resonated across capital markets. Within less than two weeks of its launch, Meta's Muse reached 2.8 million downloads. Meta shares surged over 20% in cumulative gains over the past month, adding more than 200 billion dollars to its market capitalization.
Investment firms have swiftly raised price targets for Meta, as the company now has a compelling new narrative to pitch to Wall Street. That story centers on the immense commercial potential unlocked by AI agents penetrating everyday consumer markets. As a prominent application of artificial intelligence, AI agents are widely seen as transitioning from experimental concepts to large-scale deployment this year.
Prior to the release of Muse, market attention focused heavily on enterprise-grade and workflow-oriented agents, particularly coding agents. A global survey released by McKinsey in late August indicated that among large corporations with annual revenues exceeding 1 billion dollars, the proportion deploying AI agents at scale rose from 27% last year to 40%. Among these major enterprises, 31% have already scaled the use of coding agents.
In this arena, alongside established heavyweights like Anthropic and OpenAI, emerging players like Factory are gaining rapid ground. Last week, Factory, which specializes in AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, raised 200 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation, more than tripling its valuation from the previous funding round. With Meta's launch of Muse, consumer-facing AI agents have opened up an entirely new horizon.
E-commerce represents one of the most immediate revenue-generating application scenarios for AI agents. Drawing on behavioral data from over 1.5 billion consumers, Salesforce noted that AI influenced 20% of global online sales during the 2025 holiday season, equivalent to 262 billion dollars, while shopping traffic routed through AI converted at nine times the rate of social media traffic. Salesforce's latest survey this year shows that a growing number of consumers are delegating product search and filtering to AI agents, with usage of agentic search surging 200% year-on-year.
Data from Adobe cross-validates this trend, showing that US retail site traffic driven by AI channels jumped 125% year-on-year between April and June 2026, after soaring 693% year-on-year during the 2025 holiday season. Yet as AI begins executing purchases and payments directly for consumers, fresh security vulnerabilities are emerging. Major financial institutions including Bank of America and Commonwealth Bank of Australia warned on the 22nd that the pace of AI shopping agent development is outstripping existing consumer protection and payment security frameworks, potentially escalating risks surrounding fraud, privacy, and payment authorization.
Meta itself acknowledged that Muse has not yet achieved full automation. Even so, with capital markets responding so aggressively to this new paradigm, the battle among tech giants over AI agent development and deployment is bound to intensify. We will continue to follow these developments closely.
Source: CNBC
