Meta’s Muse moves into small business, and it already talks to HighLevel

What launched

On Sept. 29, Meta announced Muse for Small Business: a set of business skills and connectors inside Muse, the personal AI agent Meta introduced earlier in September. Muse is available in the US and Canada, so this one reaches our market on day one.

The pitch is simple: give Muse a goal, such as running your business or finding new customers, and it does the work, using the tools you already run on.

What it connects to

According to Meta, owners can connect their Instagram professional account analytics, Facebook Pages and Meta ad accounts in a few clicks. They can also connect a long list of third-party tools, including Asana, Box, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, Granola, HighLevel, Intuit QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Lovable, Notion, Shopify, Slack, Stripe and Zoom. Custom connectors are supported for services Meta doesn’t cover yet.

Meta’s suggested prompts tell you who it’s built for. One asks Muse to “analyze this year’s sales, campaigns, and social and make me a growth plan.” Another asks it to look at what’s working in ads and content and “draft a campaign for next week.”

“Nothing publishes, sends, or spends without your approval.”

Meta

The approval gate is the headline

For agencies, the most important line in the announcement is about control. Meta says nothing publishes, sends or spends without the owner’s approval. That’s a sensible default, but it also means someone has to be the approver. If you manage a client’s ad account, you need to agree who that person is before the client connects anything.

Where HighLevel fits

HighLevel went live as a Muse connector on Sept. 29. Its release notes say users authenticate through OAuth, pick which CRM sub-accounts to share, and approve access by scope. They describe access to “over 600 operations across 38 CRM domains” through HighLevel’s MCP tools. In practice, an owner could ask Muse to update contacts, manage workflows or book appointments in their HighLevel account.

That’s powerful, and it’s exactly why access should be scoped and logged. (Our Stack Check covers the connector in more detail.)

Why it matters if you market local businesses

• Owners will ask Muse before they ask you. If an agent can read the ad account and draft next week’s campaign, your value moves up the stack: strategy, offer, creative judgement and accountability.
• Messy data makes a confident-sounding agent wrong. Agents analyze what’s there. Broken conversion tracking, duplicate contacts and vague campaign names will produce confident, wrong advice.
• Governance is now a service. Deciding who approves what, which tools are connected and how changes are reviewed is real work clients will pay for.

What we don’t know yet

Meta’s announcement doesn’t detail exactly which ad settings Muse can change, or the price of its paid plans. It describes Muse as free for most of what people need, with subscriptions for those who want more. We’ll update this explainer as Meta publishes more.

What to do this week

1. Ask each client whether they’ve seen or tried Muse.
2. Agree, in writing, who approves agent actions on each account.
3. Connect only what’s needed, and review connected apps monthly.
4. Fix tracking and naming before any agent starts “optimizing.”
5. Forward the “For your clients” note below.