Meta wants its chatbot to do your chores now, too

The update

Meta is adding productivity features to Meta AI, powered by its new Muse Spark 1.1 model. The assistant can now read your calendar to plan events and generate daily briefings, run in-depth research you can redirect mid-response, and handle recurring tasks like weekly meal plans or restock alerts after a single setup. It's rolling out today in select markets in the Meta AI app and on the web, with WhatsApp and more countries coming in the following weeks.

Under the hood

The concrete examples Meta gives are telling: browsing Facebook Marketplace for used furniture that fits a kitchen renovation budget, finding restaurants for an event and cross-checking your calendar for a free day, and set-and-forget tasks that recur without re-prompting. The research feature also gets better at turning web summaries into a report, presentation, or plan, and lets you steer direction while the answer is still generating — the same mid-response correction ChatGPT already offers.

The signal

This is a real reversal. Last year Meta's own CPO told employees the plan was entertainment and friend connections, not the "obsessive" productivity focus of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Now Meta is running straight at those companies on their own turf, which tells you the assistant-that-does-things model is winning the argument inside every major lab. The interesting question is whether Meta's distribution — WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook — can make an also-ran assistant matter through sheer reach.

The backstory

Meta frames this as its "next step toward personal superintelligence," the phrase Zuckerberg has been leaning on. But the more honest framing is the one buried in the story: a year ago Chris Cox told employees Meta would not chase productivity the way its rivals did. That strategy is now dead, or at least quietly retired.

The timeline

1. 2025
   Meta CPO Chris Cox tells employees the goal is entertainment and friend connection, not obsessive productivity
2. Jul 24, 2026
   Meta AI adds calendar access, daily briefings, and steerable research via Muse Spark 1.1, rolling out in select markets

Who it's for

PMs

→Steerable research and web summaries into reports

Founders

→A rival assistant with WhatsApp-scale reach

The catch

This is a "select markets" launch on two surfaces, with the big one — WhatsApp — still weeks out. Everything here is a capability claim from a Meta blog post; there are no benchmarks, no independent testing, and calendar-reading assistants live and die on how well they actually parse messy real-world schedules. "Personal superintelligence" is marketing, not a spec.

What to watch

Watch the WhatsApp rollout — that's where Meta's distribution advantage actually lives, and where a middling assistant could still reach a billion people. Also worth watching: whether Muse Spark 1.1 is competitive with the frontier models Meta is now openly comparing itself to, or whether the features arrive before the model quality does.