Meta (META.US) Wins More Wall Street Bullish Calls After Muse Goes Viral! Cantor Fitzgerald Raises Price Target to $860, Trillion-Dollar AI Agent Market in Sight

As Meta Platforms' (META.US) personal AI agent Muse went viral after launch, Cantor Fitzgerald believes that if AI agents become the "third S-curve of growth" in artificial intelligence development, Meta is poised to be one of the main beneficiaries of this trend. The firm reiterated its "Overweight" rating on Meta and sharply raised its price target from $680 to $860. Cantor analyst Deepak Mathivanan said Meta has a relatively complete competitive advantage in the AI agent space, including models specifically trained for agent tasks, Muse's differentiated user experience, and a massive computing infrastructure. These advantages are expected to help Meta rapidly roll out personal AI agents to its vast user base before competitors enter at scale. Muse quickly surged to the top of Apple Inc.'s App Store after its launch earlier this month. Its rapid rise to popularity not only boosted market attention on Meta's AI business but also sparked investor concerns that AI agents could disrupt certain traditional business models, triggering a selloff in several related industry stocks recently. Mathivanan believes the total addressable market for personal AI agents could reach up to $1 trillion. He said that under a relatively narrow business model calculationconsidering only subscription revenue and e-commerce transaction commissionsthe long-term revenue potential for personal AI agents alone could exceed $250 billion; if further estimated more broadly based on the time AI saves users and its corresponding value, the market opportunity could exceed $1 trillion. Using the smartphone market as a reference, Mathivanan noted that smartphones have already generated over $600 billion in advertising, commission, and subscription revenue by improving the internet usage experience. He believes that if personal AI agents achieve mass adoption in the future, their long-term market size could even exceed the related market created by smartphones. He pointed out that if AI agents become the "third S-curve of growth" in the AI industry, Meta is already in a relatively favorable position. He also said Meta possesses the "right combination" of model architecture, agent operating framework, and user interface needed to drive further adoption of Muse. Among these, Muse's product design is particularly noteworthy. Mathivanan noted that Meta's accumulated product experience in Feed and recommendation systems aligns well with AI agent applications, allowing Muse to simultaneously host multiple user interaction modes such as chat, feeds, and creative content, thereby increasing usage frequency and user stickiness. At the same time, Meta's massive computing infrastructure means that once Muse's user scale continues to grow, the company has the foundation to rapidly expand AI inference capacity and promote the product to its existing user base. This also gives Meta a different expansion path compared to AI startups lacking a massive user base and computing resources. However, Muse is still in an investment phase at this stage. Mathivanan estimates that in the early days of Muse's launch, Meta bears a cost of approximately $0.25 per AI task, which translates to about $11 per user per month based on current average usage levels. He believes that Muse's unit economics are in effect still being subsidized by Meta, but as user scale expands and AI models continue to improve, there is significant room for improvement in inference costs and profit margins. Mathivanan expects that over the next 18 to 24 months, Meta has multiple ways to reduce Muse's per-task cost by more than 80%. If this goal is achieved, Muse could potentially become profitable as a standalone operation through a "free + paid value-added" Freemium model. On the commercialization front, Mathivanan believes Meta has multiple paths, including charging subscription fees for high-frequency or premium feature users, and earning commissions from commercial transactions facilitated by AI agents. He said that while Meta may currently place more emphasis on Muse's user CKH HOLDINGS usage scale, continuously declining costs will create greater room for future commercialization.