Meta on Tuesday unveiled its AI personal agent app, offering it to a select group of users under a paid model as the company and the wider artificial intelligence industry face growing scrutiny and skepticism.

The app, internally known as Hatch, is powered by Meta’s Muse Spark family of foundation models, which Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang has been rapidly developing and introducing since April.

According to Meta, the Muse app allows users to delegate digital tasks to AI-powered assistants, including booking appointments, completing online forms and monitoring home security camera feeds.

“Behind the scenes, Muse might be doing very advanced coding workflows, or building sophisticated integrations, or doing quite a lot of heavy lifting while keeping that very sort of simple for the user,” Wang told CNBC.

Wang said the Muse personal agent would be offered through a free tier, with paid monthly subscription options costing $20 or $100, depending on users’ level of usage.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who hired Wang last year following a $14bn investment in his startup, Scale AI, has signalled to investors that the company’s next major AI push will focus on advanced digital assistants capable of sorting through emails and finding deals on products such as furniture.

Zuckerberg has described these advanced assistants as the next major evolution of AI models, citing them as one of the key reasons Meta is investing heavily in data centres and other AI infrastructure.