Zuckerberg: Meta's Enterprise AI Goes Beyond Chatbots

Meta made its entrance into the enterprise AI market in June with the introduction of a new AI agent designed to assist businesses with customer service, support, and various daily operations. However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg conveyed to investors during Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call that the technology giant’s enterprise AI ambitions are far more expansive.

"We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers," Zuckerberg stated. These strategic additions could potentially position the company to generate new revenue streams beyond advertising, which currently accounts for the majority of its income, and subscriptions, which contribute a smaller proportion.

Initially, the company will concentrate on capitalizing on the opportunity to serve its existing advertiser base by offering AI agents that can function across messaging applications and other platforms. These agents will enable businesses to interact with their customers through an AI interface.

"And, just like the ad system, effectively, we will get paid when we deliver results for those businesses," Zuckerberg explained. "We view this as an extension of the sales and the partnerships that we have with many millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses that use our platforms."

He further detailed Meta's potential expansion beyond serving the small business customer, who constitutes a significant portion of its current advertiser base, by eventually making Meta’s internal tools available to external customers.

"There are other enterprise customers who I think we’re increasingly going to serve, too," Zuckerberg clarified. He continued, "We’re building coding and developing and internal productivity tools partially because we need to build them ourselves, and we need to make sure that we have tools that are tuned for ourselves. Now that we have those, we feel like there’s a large opportunity to serve — whether that’s small businesses or larger businesses."

This strategic shift may not be without its challenges; Zuckerberg acknowledged that selling to the enterprise sector requires a "different muscle" than what Meta has historically exercised.

Regarding Meta's potential to sell compute resources to enterprise customers, the company is focused on balancing its need for revenue with the imperative to execute its own future plans. That said, Meta emphasized multiple times that it currently has the opportunity to sell compute at "a significant premium over what we paid for it."

Nonetheless, Zuckerberg cautioned investors that it "would be foolish" to "sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit." Instead, he characterized Meta’s approach as a "portfolio" that incorporates a blend of long-term and short-term strategies for its compute infrastructure. He noted, "As we get closer to personal superintelligence, we are . . . going to need hardware that allows you to seamlessly interact with it."

The call also highlighted Meta's substantial ambitions concerning agentic AI — AI systems capable of acting on behalf of a person or business, rather than merely answering questions — which will not be exclusively offered to businesses.

Consumers are also being promised "personal AI agents," along with AI smartglasses designed to interact with the real world around them.

Furthermore, Meta is employing AI technology, specifically large language models, to accelerate the development of its suite of social applications. Recent launches in this area include an app for Marketplace sellers, another for Facebook Groups, one for vibe-coded games, and various other experimental projects. Zuckerberg teased that more are on the way.

"I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps," Zuckerberg stated. "So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them to the people who will find them interesting."