The popularity of Meta's Muse and the private product Instinct has led investors to reassess the structural impact of the AI Agent wave on the software industry. Morgan Stanley believes that the rise of consumer-facing Agents is not a short-term earnings catalyst, but it is strengthening the medium-term bull case for communications, network infrastructure, and e-commerce software.

According to market desk reports, Morgan Stanley analysts including Elizabeth Porter noted in their latest research that the accelerating adoption of personal AI Agents is reshaping the growth logic of communications software from the demand side—consumers initiate more business interactions through Agents, while enterprise-side AI reduces response costs, together driving an expansion in communications volume and usage-based monetization models. This trend has the most direct exposure for Twilio and Wix.

For network infrastructure providers, the report argues that the bearish narrative of "declining human traffic shrinking website construction demand" is being redefined: Agents increasingly need systems that support discovering merchants, booking services, and completing transactions, which could benefit the online transaction infrastructure needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Morgan Stanley explicitly rates the North American software industry as "Attractive," but also cautions that these trends more reflect an improvement in valuation benchmarks and long-term expectations, rather than a direct boost to near-term quarterly results and earnings guidance.

Muse and Instinct: From Q&A Tools to Task Execution

According to the Morgan Stanley report, Muse and Instinct are a new generation of personal AI Agents whose core difference lies in shifting from "answering questions" to "executing tasks on behalf of users." Meta officially launched Muse on September 8, 2026, through its apps and WhatsApp; Instinct is a private product mainly accessible via iMessage.

Both products possess capabilities such as browsing web pages, filling out forms, and booking travel, and can complete consumer transactions with user authorization. In mid-September, both companies rolled out limited-edition outbound call features, allowing Agents to proactively contact merchants for appointments, reservations, and customer service matters.

This feature expansion is seen by Morgan Stanley as a key milestone—Agents evolve from passively responding to user commands to proactively representing users in interactions with businesses, directly connecting consumer behavior with enterprise communications systems.

Communications Software: A New Demand-Side Entry Point

The report points out that AI's impact on the Contact Center market was previously focused mainly on enterprises using fewer agents to handle existing inquiries, putting pressure on traditional per-seat pricing models. The emergence of consumer-side Agents introduces a new demand-side opportunity: consumers can initiate inquiries and tasks through Agents that they previously abandoned due to lack of time or willingness.

Morgan Stanley summarizes this logic as: "Enterprise AI makes responses cheaper, consumer AI makes initiation easier." The expansion of communications volume, on the one hand, can buffer seat pressure, and on the other hand, accelerates demand for automated services billed by duration, interaction count, or outcomes.

The report believes that RingCentral's clearest opportunity lies in its usage-based AI Reception (AIR) product; the bear cases for NICE and FIVN have weakened, but whether they can win at the AI layer and monetize to offset human agent pressure remains uncertain. The report shows that AI revenue accounts for approximately 15% of FIVN's subscription revenue, with a similar share of NICE's annualized cloud revenue, and Morgan Stanley looks forward to seeing AI revenue accelerate toward this proportion and above, while overall revenue stabilizes or even accelerates growth.

Twilio: Usage Expansion Plus Software Value-Add

The report positions Twilio as the company with the broadest exposure in the communications sector. Morgan Stanley emphasizes that the core opportunity is not the conversation itself with AI assistants, but the series of communications triggered during Agent task completion—identity verification SMS, booking confirmations, and follow-up messages all constitute incremental communications volume.

On the voice front, Twilio can support both Agent-initiated outbound calls and enterprise-side inbound answering. Additionally, software add-on products such as Conversation Relay provide Twilio with an additional path to capture higher revenue per interaction beyond pure connectivity services.

However, Morgan Stanley remains cautious on short-term earnings expectations, citing Twilio's previous statements—the company indicated that the more-than-5% outperformance in the first half should not be viewed as the "new normal," and the company expects outperformance to moderate.

Network Infrastructure: From Traffic Logic to Transaction Logic

For network infrastructure providers such as Wix and GoDaddy, the report argues that the rise of Agents is reshaping demand logic: the value of websites is no longer mainly reflected in hosting human traffic, but in whether they can support the backend capabilities for Agents to discover merchants, complete bookings, and execute transactions.

Morgan Stanley believes Wix has better exposure than GoDaddy—the latter's larger domain business dilutes the transmission effect of the Agent wave. Wix's MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Headless strategies may preserve its role as the backend operations layer even when external AI platforms dominate website generation or consumer interfaces, maintaining its core relationship with merchants in booking, e-commerce, and business operations.

The report also cautions that feature bundling is a monetization risk: integrating related features into larger platforms like GoDaddy Airo may promote user retention in the short term, but may not necessarily generate independent paid upgrade revenue. Competition from AI-native website building tools also constitutes an ongoing pressure.

E-Commerce Infrastructure: Shopify in the Most Favorable Position

In the e-commerce software space, Morgan Stanley clearly identifies Shopify as the most direct beneficiary. The report believes Shopify has already built the core infrastructure required for Agent platforms—including the standardized real-time product and inventory layer Catalog, the merchant-side control panel Agentic Storefronts, and the transaction standard UCP.

The strategic value of this system lies in integration efficiency: once an Agent platform integrates with Shopify, it can cover billions of products across millions of merchants, without the need to negotiate and maintain individual integrations with each consumer brand, giving Shopify a significant competitive advantage at the integration level.

Furthermore, the fragmentation of consumer discovery paths—extending from search, social, and retail media to Agent channels—further highlights the value of a unified commerce system. The ability of a single data record system to integrate and coordinate multi-channel performance becomes increasingly critical. The report also notes that as Agent activity spreads, screening mechanisms based on product attributes rather than media spend may give long-tail niche brands on the platform more exposure. Morgan Stanley stated it will conduct deeper dedicated research into Shopify's multi-layered opportunities in the Agent ecosystem.