If you had any lingering doubts about how seriously Meta is taking AI, the company has helpfully provided a new one: on Wednesday it announced that its Muse assistant is now available as a dedicated iPad app. That's a milestone Instagram took roughly 15 years to reach, despite users asking for it constantly and loudly the entire time.

Muse, by contrast, made the leap to iPad just one month after launching on iPhone. In fairness, dragging something like Muse onto a tablet may be easier than doing it for Instagram, given Muse's text-heavy interface, where image and video resolution and formatting matter considerably less.

Since launching on iOS and Android on September 8, Muse has racked up more than 6.6 million installs, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The app, now one of dozens of consumer-facing AI agents, lets users connect their accounts to keep tabs on email, meetings, bills, and more, and to complete tasks like booking reservations, ordering groceries, setting goals, and making purchases.

To make all that work, Meta has been steadily adding partners, which show up in Muse as "connectors." Users can add and sign in to them selectively, depending on which parts of their online life they're comfortable handing over to an AI agent.

With the iPad release, Meta has updated that list with several newer additions, including connectors aimed at small businesses, such as Asana, Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub, Klaviyo, and Zoom, plus connectors for Meta ad accounts. It also added Notion and Granola.

Beyond that, Meta recently announced more retail partners, including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart, and Wayfair. These let the agent shop those retailers' sites and complete transactions on users' behalf. And because this technology is still new, those experiences can still run into issues when websites mistake agents for bots and block their access - which is awkward, given that the agent is, in fact, a bot.

On Tuesday, Meta announced it's working with industry partners on a technological fix for that problem: an open standard that would let personal AI agents identify themselves to businesses. That would help businesses sort the good bots from the bad. A noble goal, and one that will surely be resolved quickly and without any competing corporate interests whatsoever.