Key Takeaways:
Meta Platforms Inc. is pushing into enterprise software with a new AI business agent that can autonomously answer customer questions, book appointments and close sales across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — a strategic pivot that comes as the social media giant spends up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
"This is definitely an enterprise play," Naomi Gleit, Meta's head of product, said in an interview. "We actually want to take actions now. We actually want it to be able to complete the payment, to process the booking, to place the order."
The agent, announced Wednesday at Meta's WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference in London, builds on chatbot versions that more than 1 million businesses already use. It can qualify sales leads, recommend products and escalate complex queries to human staff. Meta said it is also testing daily briefing summaries of overnight chats and plans to add market research, calendar management and competitive intelligence capabilities.
The launch marks Meta's most aggressive attempt to diversify beyond its core advertising business, which still accounts for about 98 percent of revenue. The company has struggled for years to sell products and services beyond ads, but Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has increasingly framed AI agents as a new revenue stream. "As our models advance, your agent will take on more and eventually help you run your whole business," he said in prepared remarks.
Meta is entering a crowded field. Amazon and Microsoft recently released their own agent tools, while OpenClaw — an open-source AI agent platform that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang called "the most popular open-source project in the history of humanity" — has attracted millions of users. Alphabet Inc.'s Google and AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic are also competing for enterprise customers.
The Business Agent will be free initially, with paid subscription tiers coming in the next few months under Meta's new Meta One brand, introduced last week. Large enterprises that use WhatsApp's existing business platform will be charged based on token consumption, similar to how they pay per message today. Meta also launched a Business Agent Platform that lets companies connect third-party systems including Shopify Inc., Zendesk Inc. and Shopee.
More than 200 million small businesses use WhatsApp, and Meta said its paid messaging services on the platform crossed a $2 billion annual run-rate in December. The company's daily active users declined sequentially for the first time since it began reporting the metric in 2019, adding urgency to finding new revenue sources.
Meta's enterprise push comes with risks. Earlier this week, hackers convinced the company's AI support chatbot to hand over access to high-profile Instagram accounts, exposing flaws in the underlying support system. Gleit said the incident involved a bug in a separate technical check rather than the agent itself, but acknowledged the challenges of deeply integrating AI into business operations.
The company has created a new Enterprise Solutions team that will embed engineers with large customers, a model used by Anthropic to navigate internal politics around AI adoption and write custom code. Gleit is also working to consolidate Meta's various AI agents — including the Meta AI consumer chatbot and an ads-focused business assistant launched last month — into a unified platform.
Meta shares rose 4.24 percent on Wednesday to close at $506.87, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $1.3 trillion. The stock has gained about 18 percent year-to-date, though it remains below its 2021 peak as investors weigh the massive capital spending against uncertain returns from AI.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
