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.

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“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........

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