Meta is intensifying its efforts to diversify revenue streams beyond its advertising business, with a new focus on generating income through artificial intelligence, specifically targeting the booming market for AI agents.
The company announced on Wednesday the launch of new Meta Business AI agent capabilities, deployable within applications like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, designed to automatically respond to customer inquiries, recommend products, and handle bookings.
This functionality will be included in MetaOne, a paid subscription bundle for businesses that Meta launched last week, which consolidates various premium services for creators and enterprises. At that time, Meta also indicated plans to test subscription services for its MetaAI mobile and web platforms.
In prepared remarks for a business event in London, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, "Today I'm launching Meta Business AI, so any business, no matter its size, can have an agent to engage with customers and help them run their operations. Now a clothing store in Birmingham or a bakery in São Paulo can provide highly customized customer service around the clock, just like the biggest brands."
Since Facebook initiated its targeted advertising business in 2007, Zuckerberg has built a highly profitable operation centered on online ads. Advertising still accounts for approximately 98% of Meta's total revenue. Over the years, the company's attempts to sell software and hardware products have met with limited success. While AI has already bolstered its core business, Zuckerberg harbors greater ambitions in the field, aiming to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in both advanced foundational model development and commercial services.
Zuckerberg noted that Meta is currently developing capabilities for autonomous agent operation, enabling them to perform higher-level business tasks such as advising merchants, identifying growth opportunities, providing competitive intelligence, and offering real-time analysis of business performance.
He added in his remarks, "As the foundational models get better, the agents will be able to handle more and more tasks, eventually taking over the entire operation of a business."
Meta initially launched a free beta version of this service last October, then named Business AI, which was available for testing only in select countries like Mexico and India.
Meta's entry comes at a time of intensifying competition in the AI agent space. Amazon and Microsoft have recently released similar intelligent tools, while the free OpenClaw AI agent platform, described by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang as "the hottest open-source project in human history," has attracted a massive influx of users.
For larger enterprises already using Meta's WhatsApp Business platform, the new AI agent features will be billed based on actual usage, following the same pricing model as businesses pay for sending individual messages to customers on the platform.
Meta stated that business clients will also be able to connect to a new Meta Business AI open platform, integrating with third-party data sources like Shopify and Zendesk to deliver personalized customer service through the chat applications their customers commonly use.
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