Zuckerberg says Meta’s enterprise AI opportunity extends beyond agents

In June, Meta entered the enterprise AI market with a new AI agent aimed at enterprises, to help with customer service, support and other day-to-day operations. But the tech giants’ AI ambitions are more expansive, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on a second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

“We see a huge opportunity for enterprises to sell to businesses, including APIs, proxies, potentially directly selling compute, and other services we build for large customers,” Zuckerberg said. These additions will likely enable the company to create new revenue streams beyond advertising, which drives the bulk of its business, and subscriptions, which contribute a smaller share.

Initially, the company will focus on the opportunity to serve its existing base of advertisers by offering AI agents that work across messaging apps and elsewhere. These allow businesses to interact with their customers through an AI interface.

“Just like the advertising system, we’ll actually get our money when we get results for those companies,” Zuckerberg said. “We see this as an extension of the sales and partnerships we have with the millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses that use our platforms.”

He also demonstrated how Meta could expand beyond serving the small business clients that make up a large portion of its current advertiser base by offering Meta’s in-house tools to external clients in the future.

“There are other enterprise customers that I think we will increasingly serve as well,” Zuckerberg explained. “We build programming, development, and productivity tools in-house in part because we need to build them ourselves, and we need to make sure we have tools tuned for ourselves,” he continued. “Now that we have these services, we feel there is a huge opportunity to provide the service – whether it is for small businesses or large corporations.”

This shift in focus may not be easy — Zuckerberg admitted that selling the company was a “different muscle” than the one Meta has historically flexed.

Meanwhile, in terms of selling Meta computing to enterprise customers, Meta is focusing on balancing its need for revenue with its need to implement its own future plans. However, the company has indicated several times that it currently has the opportunity to sell computing “at a significant premium to what we paid for it.”

However, Zuckerberg warned investors that it would be foolish to “sell all computing and make a profit in the short term.” Instead, he described Meta’s approach as a “portfolio” that includes a mix of long-term and short-term plans for its computing infrastructure. “As we get closer to personal superintelligence, we will need devices that allow you to interact with it seamlessly,” he noted.

The call also focused on Meta’s big ambitions around agentic AI – AI systems that can act on behalf of a person or company, rather than just answering questions – which won’t just be offered to businesses.

Consumers are also promised “personal AI agents,” as well as AI-powered smart glasses that can interact with the world in front of them.

Additionally, Meta is using AI technology — specifically, large language models — to more quickly build its suite of social apps. Recent launches on this front have included an app for Marketplace sellers, another for Facebook Groups, an app for tokenized games, and other experiments. “There’s more to come,” Zuckerberg joked.

“I expect it will become a lot easier to release new apps,” Zuckerberg said. “So we plan to build more ideas and use our recommendation systems to expand them to people who will find them interesting.”