Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have AI personal agents within five years

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, is trying to convince investors of his predictions for the future — where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let’s hope the future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all that stuff — without triggering a new wave of climate disasters.)

“I think it’s very unlikely that if you look five years from now, for example — whatever time period you want — that you won’t have billions of people with a personal agent who understands your goals and is working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever area you care about,” Zuckerberg said on a quarterly earnings call with investors on Wednesday.

He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, personal relationships and household management.

“As we move toward a future in which we all interact with many agents, I believe WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces will become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.

Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf rather than just answer questions. Google has focused on personalized AI agents as a major new feature in its overall search overhaul, which has angered users who have felt stymied by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude skyrocketed as engineers took a liking to the proxy programming assistant Claude Code.

However, compared to its competitors, Meta may not enjoy the same amount of confidence from investors as it continues to pour cash into innovative projects that may or may not succeed — Meta stock fell nearly 10% after posting this quarter’s earnings. Meta’s Reality Labs, the organization responsible for augmented reality headsets, virtual reality headsets and related software, lost about $4.6 billion in the quarter, which is roughly in line with the losses the division has posted every quarter since 2021. That’s a current total now at about $88 billion.

Meta spending on AI is likely to go higher, which is even more worrying at this point. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion in the same quarter last year. This represents a 91% decline year over year, and this decline was exacerbated by the company’s investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.

“We think there will still be a much higher margin selling intelligence than selling computing directly, but we think there’s a huge opportunity, obviously, to sell computing as well,” Zuckerberg said.

Ultimately, he believes the personal agents Meta is developing will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the coming months and years.”

To date, Meta Business Agents, which rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than 1 million businesses. It may be difficult to convince people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the path to “billions” has to start somewhere – a company can’t get there with enterprise agents alone.