Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the MetaConnect event on September 25, 2024 in Menlo Park, California.
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meta Efforts to monetize artificial intelligence beyond advertising are currently targeting the hottest market: AI agents.
The company announced Wednesday that its new Meta Business Agent feature can be used in apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram to respond to customer inquiries, recommend products and book appointments.
It will be included in Meta One’s business-focused subscription tier, which the company introduced last week as a way to package premium services for creators and businesses. At the time, Meta also announced that it would begin testing a subscription service for the Meta AI app and website.
“Today, I’d like to introduce Meta Business Agents. We give businesses of all sizes an agent to talk to their customers and help them run their business,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in remarks prepared for an internal event in London on Wednesday. “Now a clothing store in Birmingham or a bakery in São Paulo can offer the same always-on, highly personalized experience as the big brands.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has built a thriving online advertising company since Facebook began targeting users with ads in 2007. Meta still relies on advertising for about 98% of its revenue, and has struggled over the years to sell digital and physical products. While AI has helped strengthen the company’s core business, Zuckerberg has google In developing cutting-edge models and selling services on them.
Zuckerberg said Meta is currently “building out agent capabilities” that can perform advanced tasks such as “recommending ways to grow your business and providing competitive intelligence and real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not.”
“As our model evolves, agents will take on more work and ultimately help run the entire business,” Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks.
In October, Meta released a free test version of the service, then called Business AI, but it was only available in some countries, including Mexico and India.
Meta is jumping into an increasingly competitive field. Amazon and Microsoft recently released agent tools, and AI users flocked to the freely available OpenClaw AI agent platform, which Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described as “the most popular open source project in human history.”
Large businesses currently using Meta’s WhatsApp business platform will be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis for the new AI agent feature, similar to how they pay for every message they send to customers on the app.
Customers also have access to a new Meta Business Agent platform that allows them to connect to third-party data sources from services such as: Shopify “You can start within the messaging apps your customers already use and give them a personalized experience,” Mehta said.
Watch: Meta launches subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, with AI plans in the works.
