COLUMBUS, Ohio — On a recent afternoon, with homecoming weekend bearing down and a football game that night, April Polk was driving to a doctor’s appointment when her assistant flagged something in her business inbox: a grant application, the kind of funding opportunity a small retailer cannot afford to miss.
The assistant offered to fill it out while she drove.
“She’s like, ‘Hey, I can go on there and I can apply, and if I have any questions about what they’re asking, I’ll be sure to ping you. But other than that, I got it. Go ahead and head to the doctor,’” said Polk, the founder of JaeLuxe Shoetique. “I would’ve never been able to do that.”
The assistant is named Chase. Chase is not a person. It is Polk’s version of Muse, the artificial intelligence agent that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released to consumers on Sept. 8 and expanded for small businesses on Sept. 29. Each owner gives the agent a name at setup. Polk chose Chase.
More than 600 miles west, in Malvern, Iowa, a town of about 1,000 people, Tom Mulholland calls his agent Wally. Muse suggested the name. Mulholland, 66, later asked whether it had picked Wally because his middle name is Walter. It had no idea. He changed its on-screen avatar to a genie, after I Dream of Jeannie, “because of all the magical things it does.”
Polk is a marketer with an MBA whose women’s fashion brand does much of its business online and on social media. Mulholland is a fourth-generation grocer whose living comes from the meat counter. They have almost nothing in common except the problem Meta says it built Muse to solve. Small-business owners, the company wrote in its launch announcement, told Meta “they’re short on hours, not ideas.”
The timing is notable. Muse for Small Business arrives as public opinion about AI is souring. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June, 52% of people said AI’s expanding role in everyday life left them more concerned than excited, up from 37% in 2021. A CNN poll in September found that 75% described their feelings about AI as closer to “fear and concern” than “hope and excitement.” Only 27% told Gallup they trust businesses “a lot” or “some” to use AI responsibly.
Polk and Mulholland are not arguing with those numbers. What they describe is narrower and more practical: a month of getting back hours they had been losing to the paperwork, schedules, inboxes, and deadlines that bury the owners of very small businesses.
Polk was born and raised in Chicago and came to Columbus to attend Ohio State University. “I’m a big Buckeye and I just never left,” she said. She graduated in 2006 with a degree in marketing communications, later earned a master’s in business from Ohio Dominican University, and lives in the Gahanna-New Albany area in the city’s northeast suburbs.
She started JaeLuxe about 12 years ago, while pregnant with her first daughter, Jae, for whom the business is named. It sells shoes, clothing, and accessories “for the everyday trendsetter,” with a heavy dose of motivational, women-in-charge messaging. She also teaches as an adjunct professor and runs a property management company with her husband.
Before Muse, she said, a typical day meant scheduling marketing emails, checking which pieces needed reordering, making sure orders went out, and remembering to create and post content, “on top of the motherly and wifely duties that I have, and that is on a good day.”
“I was often overwhelmed, often missing so many pieces,” she said. “I’m an entrepreneur by heart, so I love the chaos, but sometimes it’s just like, ‘Ooh, is this really what I want to do?’”
After her second daughter was born, Polk stepped back and closed her retail location. When she relaunched the brand, she hired outside help for email marketing and advertising rather than burning herself out again. It did not go well.
“I spent thousands of dollars and things are not done correctly,” she said. She went through one set of contractors, then another agency. “They’re just missing the mark.”
Polk was among the business owners Meta brought to its Los Angeles campus in early September to test Muse before its public release. Her first move was to upload her two-page brand guide: fonts, voice, customer base. Muse reviewed her social media accounts and returned a 12-page version.
“She knows how to talk to my audience,” Polk said. “She knows what I would not say. She knows what opportunities in my email that come in for my business that we would not partake in.”
In Meta’s launch materials, Polk said that before the holiday rush, Muse audited her email automations, shut down duplicate flows that had been double-emailing customers, rebuilt her templates, and turned on tracking “so I can finally see which emails actually drive sales.” She said it rebuilt her website in about half an hour.
The smaller things matter just as much to her. On that same busy day, Chase sent her a notification: “Hey, by the way, you got something else coming up at 4 o’clock, so just a heads up.”
“She keeps me balanced. She keeps me on the right track,” Polk said. “I have been checking things off of my to-do list that would’ve taken me months to get done.”
Polk describes the relationship in boardroom terms. She said she told Chase at the start that she did not want to simply give orders. “We are in a partnership,” she said. The two have mapped out a plan for the fourth quarter and for 2027. “I’m looking at her as a C-level type of partner,” she said. “I’m not looking at her as someone, just an AI assistant.”
She also works from home, which means her 3-year-old has not had to go to daycare.
Mulholland’s store sits on Main Street in Malvern, about 30 miles southeast of Omaha. Fred E. Mulholland founded it in 1875 as a dry goods store. Tom’s grandfather added groceries. The business left the family for 17 years before Tom, who had built a reputation running a meat counter in Omaha, bought it back in 2008.
On Dec. 13, 2021, a fire destroyed the building. Mulholland could not start clearing the site for six months, he told the Mills County Opinion-Tribune, because no one was sure the wall of the building next door would hold. The store did not reopen until Dec. 20, 2024, three years and a week after the fire. To rebuild, he told Iowa PBS, he took on about $750,000 in debt.
“I’ve pretty much gambled my entire retirement on being able to provide for my community,” he said.
When he was young, Malvern had four grocery stores. Today, he said, the nearest other supermarket is 11 miles away, a hard drive in an Iowa winter for older residents, some of whom walk to his store because they have no other way to get there. The specialty sausages draw customers from hours away, and those customers buy gas, eat at the local restaurants, and stop at the coffee shop. A hot-lunch service, the idea of an employee named Cheryl, can account for a quarter of a day’s business. This month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named Mulholland Grocery to its 2026 CO—100 list of the country’s top small businesses as one of its “Champions of Adaptability” for coming back from the fire.
All of it runs through one man who works 65 hours a week. He does the ordering. He writes the ads. He does paperwork before the doors open.
“I make my money by making these sausages, by cutting steaks, by things like that,” he said. “So I need to have as much time out there as I can.”
Mulholland describes himself as the opposite of an early adopter. Meta, which funded a 2023 short documentary about his store, They Came From All Over, directed by Academy Award winner Rayka Zehtabchi, had invited him to Washington and to its Los Angeles offices earlier this year. He tried AI tools “very sparingly.”
“It’s a whole big ocean of AI, and for someone who knows nothing about it, where do I dip my toe in first?” he said.
That changed in September, when he joined the group of owners Meta introduced to Muse in Los Angeles. “I have used this in the past month more than I had used any AI in my lifetime,” he said, “probably 10 times more than I had in my lifetime.”
His first use was the weekly ad. His wholesaler sends a catalog of featured items. He used to highlight the ones he wanted, then spend a couple of hours typing them into an ad. Now he photographs the highlighted pages and sends them to Muse. The job takes about 15 minutes.
He did the same with the employee schedule he rewrites every two weeks for his staff of 10 or 11, sending a photo and asking Muse to change the dates so he could make the final tweaks himself. In Meta’s launch announcement, he said photographing employee time cards and letting Muse add them up cut “at least 15 minutes from payroll.”
Muse has written some of his Facebook posts, and he has it post to Instagram as well, a platform he admits he “never remembered to use.” It knows Thursday is taco day and offers to post about it. It sends him reminders. He has connected it to QuickBooks, though he has not yet used that feature. He hopes it can eventually help reconcile the store’s overnight sales reports.
“I’m very good at what I do,” he said in the same announcement, “but that doesn’t mean I’m good at all of the different roles a small-business owner has to play, and Muse is taking over a few of them.”
Muse is what the industry calls an agent: Rather than simply answering questions, it can carry out tasks in the apps an owner connects to it, working in the background while the owner does something else. The small-business version links to Facebook Pages, Instagram professional analytics, and Meta ad accounts, along with outside software including Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Canva, Klaviyo, Slack, and Zoom.
Meta promotes it for analyzing sales and building growth plans, triaging email and calendars, drafting ads and customer messages, and managing cash flow and inventory. The company promises that “nothing publishes, sends, or spends without your approval.” Basic use is free up to a limit, and subscriptions of $20 or $100 a month cover heavier use.
The consumer app caught on quickly. TechTarget reported that it was downloaded 5 million times in North America in its first three weeks and overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 app in Apple’s U.S. store.
For a small business, the key question is how much access an owner hands over. “Agentic AI is ultimately a governance challenge,” Wayne Hankins, an analyst at Gartner, told TechTarget, urging owners to limit what an agent can reach and to require human approval for sensitive actions.
Customers may have their own reservations. Asked about companies using AI to make their ads, 49% of people in a Bentley University-Gallup survey disapproved, and 19% approved.
Both Polk and Mulholland have close ties to Meta. Each has worked with the company’s small-business programs, and Polk said her involvement goes back more than a decade. Both were among the owners Meta brought in to test Muse before launch, and both are quoted in the company’s announcement. Neither described a mistake by the tool in their interviews. Both said they still review and adjust its work, and their agents do not make changes without their approval.
Mulholland started out among the hesitant.
Of the roughly two dozen owners in his Los Angeles group, he said, “I was by far the oldest and by far the least technical. So considering that it’s doing all of these things for me, just think what it could do for somebody that really knows what they’re doing.”
Polk puts it more bluntly. She believes the tool levels a playing field she shares with “million- and billion-dollar brands,” and she thinks hesitant owners will pay for waiting.
“Technology is growing, it’s changing,” she said, “and you are going to either hop on the wave or you’re going to get left behind.”
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Neither of them talks about AI as a revolution. They talk about a grant application started during a drive to the doctor, an ad finished in 15 minutes instead of two hours, a 4 o’clock reminder, a taco-day post that would otherwise have gone unwritten. For a grocer who has staked his retirement on keeping a town fed and a mother who wants to keep her toddler home, the hours they are getting back are what matter.
“It’s just little things like that that can add up,” Mulholland said.