Read Only First

I've handed ad account access to a lot of people over the years. Freelancers, agencies, a nephew who "knows Facebook." The rule I landed on after a few expensive lessons is simple. Nobody touches the budget until they've shown me they can read the account.

Now there's a new applicant, and it works around the clock.

On September 29, Meta launched Muse for Small Business, a version of its Muse agent that connects to your Meta ad accounts, your Facebook Pages and your Instagram analytics, plus a stack of outside tools like Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Klaviyo and HighLevel. Meta's pitch is that an agent with context on your whole operation beats a chatbot you have to brief from scratch every time.

It's free for most of what you'd do with it, and it lives inside the company that sells you the ads. Think about both of those before you click connect. Below is my setup and my test plan.

Muse launched as a personal agent on September 8. Each user gets an agent running on its own virtual machine in Meta's cloud, with a browser you can watch while it works. A permissions system Meta calls Sentinel decides which services it can reach and separates reading from writing.

The small business version adds skills and connectors on top of that same agent. Per TechCrunch and Engadget, here's what plugs in:

Meta's own examples are the kind of thing an owner would actually ask for. Analyze sales, campaigns and social activity and draft a growth plan. Look at what's performing and draft a week of posts plus a new campaign for review. Review monthly financials for odd expenses. Flag the emails that need a reply and draft them.

What's missing at launch matters too. Parix's review notes no HubSpot, Salesforce or Google Ads connectors. So if half your spend is on Google, Muse only sees half the picture, and it'll still talk like it sees all of it.

The agent itself is cheap. Muse is free with a weekly usage limit, and paid plans run $20 or $100 a month for more usage. Meta's subscription page, as summarized by eesel and Parix, names the tiers Power at $20 and Maximum at $100, with weekly token allowances instead of task counts. Meta doesn't publish the free tier's limit.

A few things the price tag doesn't tell you:

Meta's headline promise is that nothing gets published, sent or spent without your approval. Out of the box, that's true. It's also easy to loosen without realizing it.

Per Meta's help center, as quoted in this breakdown of the permission defaults, approvals come in up to five flavors: Allow once, Allow for this task, Allow for this site, Always allow, and Deny. Each connector can sit on "Ask for some actions" or "Always ask."

You may remember the Marketplace seller in September whose agent handed his pickup address to a buyer after he tapped the wrong flavor of yes. Meta said no privacy controls were breached, and technically that's right. The controls did exactly what he told them to. He just tapped the wrong button.

Here's the setup I'd use for the first two weeks:

One more thing I couldn't confirm from any source I trust: exactly which Ads Manager actions Muse can take on its own versus only draft. Meta's material says it can analyze campaigns and draft new ones for review. Nobody I read documents whether it can edit a live budget, pause an ad set or duplicate a winner. Until someone documents it, assume it can do more than you think, and make it ask.

And set an account spending limit in Ads Manager before you connect. That limit holds no matter what any agent decides to do.

All five are reading jobs, on purpose. If it can't read the account as well as a decent junior buyer, it doesn't get to make changes.

This is the fastest way to find out whether it understands your account or just sounds like it does. Ask the questions you already know the answers to.

Then open Ads Manager and check three numbers by hand. If any of them are off, stop there and run it again tomorrow. If they're off twice, you have your verdict on reporting.

This is tedious, pattern based work, which is exactly what I'd want an agent doing.

Notice the 1, 3 and 7 day windows. That's how I read an account, and it's how you should make it read yours. Budgets stay with a human. I don't let Meta's automated rules touch them and I'm not about to let Meta's agent do it either.

Your Page comments are half sales leads and half chaos. Have it sort, not answer.

Quick note so you don't mix them up. Muse is your agent, not your customer service bot. Answering customers in WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct is a separate Meta product called Business Agent. Muse drafts. You send.

If you're paying someone, or yourself, an hour every Monday to screenshot Ads Manager into a slide, this is the test that pays for the experiment.

Compare its version to your own for two weeks. If they match, you've bought back an hour. If you'd rather have that report land in a sheet with no AI interpretation at all, a Make.com scenario can pull the same numbers on a schedule and drop them into a Google Sheet. It won't be clever about it, but you'll get the same thing every Monday.

This is the one I'm most curious about, because it's the question Ads Manager can't answer. Connect Shopify (and Stripe, if that's where your money lands) only for this test.

The last instruction matters most. Matching ad spend to store sales is guesswork for any tool or any person. A guess is fine with me as long as it's labeled as one.

Start to finish, it looks like this. One owner, one ad account, about 20 minutes a day.

Seven or more out of ten and it earns a second week with the same permissions. Less than that, disconnect and check back in a quarter. These things get better fast, but you don't owe it a retainer while it learns.

What it doesn't earn in week two, under any score: budget changes, publishing without approval, or Always allow on anything that talks to customers.

Against Go High Level. If your leads already live in Go High Level, Muse can connect to it, which is the interesting part. HighLevel holds the pipeline, Meta holds the ads, and Muse is the first thing I've seen that reads both in one conversation without you building anything. For running conversations with leads, I'd still keep that inside HighLevel, where your workflows and history live.

Against Make.com. Make.com does the boring version of half these jobs with no AI judgment at all: pull numbers, drop them in a sheet, ping Slack when a cost per result crosses a line. It's slower to build and much easier to trust. My split: Make for anything that has to run the same way every time, Muse for questions you'd ask a smart person once.

Against doing it yourself. The honest benchmark is you, in Ads Manager, on a Monday morning with coffee. If Muse isn't faster than you and just as accurate, I wouldn't bother with it.

Whatever you test, record the calls where you review numbers with your team or clients in Fathom. When the agent's report and the human conversation disagree, you'll want both on file.

It grades the house's homework. Meta built the agent, sells the ads and keeps the data. Meta says Muse conversations and the agent's machine aren't shared with its ad systems. I'll take them at their word and still assume no advice from Muse will ever tell you to spend less on Meta.

The ad permissions aren't documented. I couldn't find a clear list of what it can change in a live account versus only draft. Until that list exists, Always ask stays on.

One seat, no admin. Agencies and anyone with a team will hit this wall immediately.

It only sees Meta's half of your ads. No Google Ads connector at launch, so cross channel questions come back half answered.

Custom connectors are on you. Meta doesn't review them. Don't build one into anything holding customer data.

The web isn't always open to it. Amazon blocked Muse from its store on September 21, saying the agent didn't identify itself. If your workflow depends on an agent visiting someone else's site, that site gets a vote.

My verdict: worth a week, on read only, starting today. The account audit and the creative fatigue check are where I'd expect real value, and I'd start on the free tier and only pay if the weekly limit actually gets in the way. Anything with a send button stays behind Always ask, and you keep your hands on the budget.

Turn off model training in Muse before you connect a single account.

Set an account spending limit in Ads Manager, then connect only your ad account and your Page, both on Always ask.

Run the account audit prompt and check three numbers against Ads Manager by hand.

Run the creative fatigue check on your biggest campaign and compare its tired list to yours.

Score each job 0 to 2 on day seven and decide whether it earns a second week.

Jordan

The AI Newsroom | Practical AI for people with a business to run.