Meta Business AI now handles 10 million weekly conversations as monetization looms

Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations a week | TechCrunch

Meta doesn't come up much in discussions of the top AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from the ongoing surge of interest in the technology. The company's business AI tools facilitated about 10 million conversations per week as of late March, up from 1 million in the beginning of this year, Meta said during its first-quarter conference call on Wednesday. The growth comes as the company recently expanded the beta program of its business AI assistant in the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. Meta isn't monetizing its business AI tools yet, offering them for free to small businesses to achieve scale, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that may change in the near future. "Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model," Zuckerberg said during the call. Meta has been baking AI capabilities into its suite of business products on its various platforms, and is working to power these products with its new large language model, Muse Spark, the first one to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division set up last year. The company said it has seen solid traction for its creative AI tools in the quarter. "Usage of our ad creative tools is also scaling, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, and particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are benefiting performance as well, with advertisers using our video generation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests," CFO Susan Li said on the call. The company is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will let advertisers connect their Meta ad account to an AI agent. Zuckerberg noted that the company's apps altogether generated revenue of $885 million in the quarter, largely due to demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its apps. Earlier this month, the company started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. The company reported profit of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion a year earlier. Revenue came in at $56.3 billion, up 33% from last year.

Meta's Business AI Handling 10 Million Weekly Conversations | PYMNTS.com

Speaking during the company's Wednesday (April 29) earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these tools were handling 10 million conversations a week by late March, compared to 1 million at the start of the year. And while Meta has not begun monetizing its business AI tools yet as it offers them gratis to small businesses as it attempts to scale, the founder hinted that could change. "Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model," Zuckerberg told analysts. Muse Spark, Meta's first model from the company's in-house artificial intelligence (AI) lab, debuted during the first quarter and now powers Meta AI across all apps and the standalone Meta AI app. Sessions per user grew double digits following the introduction, with more advanced models now in training. Meta also rolled out Meta Ads AI Connectors in open beta, allowing advertisers to connect their ad accounts to external AI agents for campaign management and optimization. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, also noted that use of the company's creative tools was scaling as well, with upward of 8 million advertisers using at least one of these offerings. Adoption has been especially strong among small and medium-sized businesses. "These tools are benefiting performance as well, with advertisers using our video generation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests," Li said. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg covered Meta's long-term vision for AI during the call, framing personal superintelligence as the company's chief product goal. "My view is that human progress has always been driven by people pursuing their individual aspirations," he said. The company also upped its full-year guidance for capital expenditures, going from its earlier range of $115 billion to $135 billion to a new projection of $125 billion to $145 billion. Meta cited rising cost of memory and additional data center capacity, and acknowledged that it has consistently underestimated its compute needs. As PYMNTS wrote in March, this level of spending puts Meta in the company of some of the biggest investors in AI infrastructure, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Meta is also reportedly slashing jobs in a move that is widely viewed as an effort to offset the investments it has been making in AI infrastructure. Last week saw a report that the company would cut 8,000 jobs, and leave another 6,000 positions unfilled.