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Muse for Small Business, and your customers' Muse

By Surfing Dog ·

On 29 September Meta launched Muse for Small Business. It’s free with usage limits, with paid plans for more, and it’s live in the US and Canada. You give it a goal, like running the business day to day or finding new customers, and it works on it with your own information.

It connects to your Instagram professional account, your Facebook Pages and your Meta ad accounts. It also works with the tools a small business already uses: Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Slack, Zoom, Notion, Canva, HighLevel and others, and it takes custom connectors too. Meta’s rule for it is that nothing publishes, sends or spends without your approval.

That covers your side of the counter. The other side matters as much.

Your customers have Muse too

Muse went out to people in the US and Canada earlier in September, as a personal agent that does things rather than only answering questions. People ask it to book an appointment, reserve a table or order something, and it goes and does it.

So picture a Saturday morning. Someone asks their Muse to book a haircut for next week, somewhere near them, before 11. Muse looks for places that can take that booking. It needs to know what you offer, what it costs and when you’re free, and then it needs a yes.

If the only way to book you is to call during opening hours, or a contact form that sends an email and waits, Muse can’t finish the job. It tells its person to try later, or it books somewhere that answered.

What Muse can use

A customer’s Muse can do its job with you when three things are true:

  • Your services and prices are written down where a program can read them.
  • Your free times are real and up to date, not a picture of a calendar.
  • There’s a way to book that answers straight away: yes, no, or here’s another time.

This is what Surfing Dog Inbox is for. It’s an open-source inbox that runs on your own domain, like inbox.yourbarber.com, and it gives every assistant a proper way in:

  • An MCP server, the standard way AI assistants plug into a service. Muse can use one as a custom connector, with no sign-in needed for a customer.
  • Your own page at the same address, where a person, or an assistant using its browser, can book a time, ask for a quote or send a message. See your page.
  • Your rules answer inside your limits. A haircut can confirm itself when the slot is free and you’re open. Anything unusual waits under Needs you.

A priced booking or order binds nobody until the person has confirmed its summary, so an assistant can’t commit someone to more than they agreed to. Every request lands as a booking, an order, a quote request or a message, and you can see where each one stands.

Muse’s directory, and custom connectors

Meta keeps a directory of connectors it has reviewed. Companies apply at muse.ai/platform, and Meta checks each one for functional, security and legal requirements.

Until a business is listed there, a customer’s Muse can still reach it as a custom connector, built from what the service publishes. Your inbox publishes both things that needs, an API description and an MCP server. Meta doesn’t review custom connectors, which is why your rules matter: every request passes through them, whoever sent it.

To be found in the first place, put your inbox’s address on your website and in your profiles, and join the Surfing Dog network. It’s a directory assistants can search for businesses near a place or by what they do, and nobody can pay to move up it.

Not in the US or Canada?

Muse isn’t available in Europe yet, and Meta hasn’t said when it will be. Your customers there already use assistants that can book for them, though. The same inbox works with Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and Grok today, and you can connect your own AI to run it.

Try it

Point your AI at our demo bike workshop and ask it to book a service: surfingdog.ai/try. It takes about a minute and you don’t need to sign up.

When you want your own, open surfingdog.ai/install and paste the one line there into your AI. It sets up the inbox and asks you before anything that costs money.

Read next: what a personal AI assistant needs from your business, and OpenAI’s dots, the other agent that launched this week.