The question of what to say to an artificial intelligence agent turns out to be not so different from the question of what to say to a new employee: be specific, be patient, and do not expect it to read your mind.
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is now in the business of answering that question for small businesses, having introduced late last month a package it calls Muse, which connects its artificial intelligence tools to various third-party applications that merchants already use. Last week, the company shared what it described as common use cases, offering a kind of curriculum for entrepreneurs who may be uncertain how to converse with software.
According to Meta, the most frequent request from business owners is a simple one: tell me what is working. The company said users are asking their Muse agents to analyze advertising campaigns and identify which creative executions are performing well and why — a task that once required either a media agency or a great deal of patience with spreadsheets.
Other popular applications, Meta said, include asking the system for guidance on how to structure an advertising campaign (a query that apparently benefits from attaching a creative brief, as if the robot were a junior account executive awaiting instructions) and connecting various applications to create what the company described as an end-to-end funnel. Businesses are linking Muse to Shopify, Canva and HighLevel, a marketing platform, to move from product analysis to creative development to media placement in a single automated sequence.
(One imagines the holding company chiefs are watching this with the calm detachment of people who have never worried about anything.)
Meta said businesses are also using Muse to establish product catalogs and install tracking pixels, tasks that have historically required either technical expertise or a tolerance for frustration.
Whether small businesses will embrace robotic colleagues with the enthusiasm Meta hopes remains, of course, to be seen. But the company is making the introduction as painless as possible — which is more than can be said for most first days on the job.
Original story published in Social Media Today | A business community for the web's best thinkers on Social Media: "Meta outlines Muse AI use cases for businesses"