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 businesses, to help with customer service, support, and other daily operations. But the tech giant’s enterprise AI ambitions are much more expansive, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call. “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 said. These additions could potentially position the business 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 own customers through an AI interface. “And, just like the ad system, effectively, we will get paid when we deliver results for those businesses,” Zuckerberg said. “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 also fleshed out how Meta could expand beyond serving the small business customer that makes up much of its current advertiser base by offering Meta’s internal tools to external customers in the future. “There are other enterprise customers who I think we’re increasingly going to serve, too,” Zuckerberg explained. “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,” he continued. “Now that we have those, we feel like there’s a large opportunity to serve — whether that’s small businesses or larger businesses.” This shift in focus may not come easy — Zuckerberg admitted that selling to the enterprise was a “different muscle” than the one Meta has historically flexed. Meanwhile, in terms of Meta selling compute to enterprise customers, Meta is focused on balancing its need for revenue and its need to execute on its own future plans. That said, the company pointed out multiple times that it currently has the opportunity to sell compute at “a significant premium over what we paid for it.” Still, Zuckerberg cautioned investors that it “would be foolish” to “sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit.” Instead, he described Meta’s approach as a “portfolio” that included a mix of long-term and short-term plans for its compute infrastructure. “As we get closer to personal superintelligence, we are . . . going to need hardware that allows you to seamlessly interact with it,” he noted. The call also focused on Meta’s sizable ambitions around agentic AI — AI systems that can act on a person’s or business’ behalf, rather than just answer questions — which won’t only be offered to businesses. Consumers, too, are being promised “personal AI agents,” as well as AI smart glasses that can interact with the world in front of them. Plus, Meta is using AI technology — specifically, large language models — to more rapidly build out its suite of social apps. Recent launches on this front have included an app for Marketplace sellers, another for Facebook Groups, one for vibe-coded games, and other experiments. More are on the way, Zuckerberg teased. “I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” said Zuckerberg. “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.”