Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday that Meta’s enterprise AI strategy goes further than just selling software agents.
The CEO outlined a plan to sell APIs, business agents, and direct compute access to large customers. This approach aims to build new revenue streams beyond advertising, which currently drives most of the business, and subscriptions.
Starting with advertisers
Initially, the company will focus on serving its existing base of advertisers by offering AI agents that work across messaging apps and elsewhere.
These tools allow businesses to interact with their own customers through an AI interface. Zuckerberg said the company will get paid when it delivers results for those businesses, effectively extending the sales and partnerships it has with millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses.
Selling internal tools
The CEO also explained how Meta could expand beyond its small business customer base by offering internal tools to external customers in the future.
“There are other enterprise customers who I think we’re increasingly going to serve, too,” Zuckerberg said. “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 noted that once these tools are built, there is a large opportunity to serve small businesses or larger ones.
He admitted that selling to the enterprise is a “different muscle” than the one Meta has historically flexed.
Regarding the sale of compute, the company is focused on balancing its need for revenue with its need to execute on future plans. It pointed out that it currently has the opportunity to sell compute at a significant premium over what it paid for it.
Zuckerberg cautioned investors that it would be foolish to sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit. 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.
Consumer tools and app building
The call also focused on Meta’s sizable ambitions around agentic AI, which will not only be offered to businesses.
Consumers are being promised personal AI agents, as well as AI smart glasses that can interact with the world in front of them.
Meta is using AI technology, specifically large language models, to more rapidly build out its suite of social apps. Recent launches 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.”
What it means
For people making things, the shift means AI will move from answering questions to taking action on their behalf. Businesses can use these agents to handle customer service and daily operations directly through messaging apps. Developers may find it easier to build and launch new social applications using the same tools Meta uses internally, potentially accelerating how quickly new features reach users.
