Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday that billions of people will own personal AI agents within five years. He described these systems as tools that understand user goals and work 24/7 to achieve them across finance, health, relationships, and household management.
“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg said.
The platform shift
Zuckerberg noted that interacting with multiple agents would make messaging apps more important. He highlighted WhatsApp as the leading platform for Meta AI interactions. The company plans to push these agents through its messaging surfaces.
Other tech giants are moving in similar directions. Google introduced custom AI agents in its Search overhaul, though users complained about the volume of AI results. Subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have risen sharply following the release of the agentic coding assistant Claude Code.
Investor confidence is wavering
Meta faces a different reality. Its stock fell almost 10% after this quarter’s earnings. Reality Labs, the division behind AR glasses and VR headsets, lost around $4.6 billion this quarter. This matches losses seen since 2021, bringing the total to roughly $88 billion.
Spending on AI is expected to rise further. Free cash flow dropped to $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion last year. That is a 91% decline year over year, driven by investments in AI infrastructure. Meta and BlackRock recently announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.
Zuckerberg stated: “We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there’s a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well.”
He believes these personal agents will form the foundation for future products and revenue lines. Meta’s business agents, available on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have already been adopted by more than one million businesses. Getting consumers to adopt similar tools may be harder, but the company needs that volume to reach its target.
What it means
Ordinary users will soon have digital assistants that manage specific tasks without constant input. The challenge lies in the cost of running these agents. Meta is betting that selling the intelligence will eventually cover the massive expense of building the data centres required to power them.
