Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations per week

Meta doesn’t appear much in discussions about the best AI products these days, but its products still benefit from the continuing increase in interest in the technology. Business AI tools facilitated about 10 million conversations per week through late March, up from 1 million conversations at the beginning of this year, Meta said during a first-quarter conference call on Wednesday.

This growth comes as the company recently expanded its AI Assistant pilot program for business in the US, EMEA, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Meta hasn’t monetized its business AI tools yet, offering it for free to small businesses for expansion, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that this may change in the near future.

“Today’s AI for Business is currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect we will also create a monetization model in the long term,” Zuckerberg said during the call.

Meta has built AI capabilities into its suite of business products across its various platforms, and is powering these products through its new large language model, Muse Spark, the first model to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division created last year.

The company said it saw strong traction for its creative AI tools in the quarter. “Use of our ad creative tools is also expanding, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, with particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools also benefit performance, as advertisers using our video creation feature saw 3% higher conversion rates in tests,” CFO Susan Lee said on the call.

The company is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will allow advertisers to connect their Meta Ads account to an AI agent.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s applications generated revenues of $885 million in this quarter, largely due to demand for paid messages on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its applications. Earlier this month, the company began testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds.

The company reported profits of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion the previous year. Revenues were $56.3 billion, up 33% from last year.