Meta Business Agent launches globally to automate customer support and sales on WhatsApp

Meta's AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now available globally

For years, WhatsApp has been a communication layer for businesses of all sizes around the world. Meta is now infusing AI into that layer in a bid to turn WhatsApp into a viable piece of workflow software for small and medium businesses. The company on Wednesday said it is making its customer support AI bot, now known as Meta Business Agent, available globally within WhatsApp. The launch comes as Meta has spent nearly two years testing AI agents in WhatsApp Business for customer support in countries like India and Mexico. Meta said the AI agent can answer customer questions, recommend products, book appointments, qualify sales leads, and reroute queries to a person if needed. The company is also making the bot available within Instagram DMs. Meta said it is testing a way for the Business Agent to provide daily briefings of chats that occurred overnight, and provide insights. The company is testing this feature with select accounts on WhatsApp Business, Instagram Pro, Messenger and Meta Business Suite. The company said it's working to add capabilities like doing market research, highlighting product features, managing users' calendars, and connecting with tools to extract competitive insights. Meta said it's also working to enable the Agent to surface businesses when you search for one or share contact details in chat. And, it is building a platform to let larger enterprises create custom agents that can connect to systems like Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee. Meta is planing to charge businesses for using this AI agent by including it in some tiers of its WhatsApp Business Premium subscription. The company noted that large businesses will pay for the agent based on how many tokens they use. This is critical for WhatsApp, which has relied on businesses paying for messaging and click-to-WhatsApp ads.

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta agents to "run your whole business" - Engadget

The company is bringing AI agents to businesses on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. During Meta's most recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg hinted that the company had big plans for AI agents. Now, we're seeing the first part of those plans come to fruition. At the company's Conversations event in London, Meta introduced AI agent tools for businesses that rely on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Officially called the "Meta Business Agent," the new tool will allow business owners to delegate many of their everyday tasks, including interacting with customers and booking appointments. Meta says that the business agent will have the ability to "close sales" and recommend products, though human business owners are able to jump into interactions at any point. The company has already been testing the agents with small businesses in India, Mexico and Brazil and says that more than a million have already signed up. Now, the agents will be available to any business on WhatsApp, as well as Instagram and Messenger. While it's not the first time that Meta has allowed businesses to automate things like replies to customers, the company clearly has a more ambitious vision for the feature than just another customer-facing chatbot. The ultimate goal, according to Zuckerberg, is for the agents to "eventually help you run your whole business," though he notes this will also require the company's underlying AI models to advance. In the meantime, Meta is working on a set of advanced agentic capabilities that allow agents to get more involved with the behind-the-scenes aspects of running a company. This includes "conducting market research, surfacing product insights, connecting with the tools to manage your calendar and providing competitive intelligence." Those features aren't widely available yet, though there's a waitlist for interested parties. There's also another major caveat. As you might imagine, Meta isn't planning to just give away all of these new AI-powered capabilities forever. While the company says that "getting started" with its new business agent is free, it plans to move the feature behind one of its new subscription offerings "in the coming months."

Meta is trying to sell AI agents to businesses in latest effort to diversify away from ads

Meta's effort to push beyond ads and to make money from artificial intelligence is now targeting the red-hot market of AI agents. The company said Wednesday that a new Meta Business Agent feature can be used across apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram to respond to customer inquiries, recommend products and book appointments. It will be included in a business-focused subscription tier for Meta One, which the company introduced last week as a way to package premium services for creators and companies. Meta also said at the time that it would begin testing subscription services for its Meta AI app and website. "Today, I want to introduce Meta Business Agent, giving every business, of any size, an agent to talk to customers and help run your operation," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks for a company event in London on Wednesday. "Now, a clothing shop in Birmingham or a bakery in São Paulo can offer the same always-on, highly-personalized experience as a major brand." Zuckerberg has run a thriving online ads company since Facebook started targeting users with advertisements in 2007. Meta still counts on ads for about 98% of revenue, having repeatedly struggled to sell digital and physical products over the years. While AI has helped the company bolster its core business, Zuckerberg has bigger ambitions in AI as he tries to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in developing cutting-edge models and selling services on top. Zuckerberg said Meta is currently "building agentic capabilities" that can do advanced tasks such as "suggesting ways to grow your business, giving you competitive intelligence and real-time insights into what's working and what's not." "As our models advance, your agent will take on more and eventually help you run your whole business," Zuckerberg said in the prepared remarks. In October, Meta released a free, test version of the service, then called Business AI, that was only available in select countries, including Mexico and India. Meta is jumping into an increasingly competitive space. Amazon and Microsoft recently released agent tools, and AI users have swarmed to the freely available OpenClaw AI agent platform that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described as "the most popular, open-source project in the history of humanity." Big businesses that currently use Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform will be charged on a consumption basis for the new AI agent feature, similar to how they pay for every message they send to customers on the app. Customers can also access a new Meta Business Agent Platform that lets them connect third-party data sources from services like Shopify and Zendesk, allowing them to "offer personalized experiences, starting within the messaging apps their customers already use," Meta said.

Meta claims new Business Agent can scale company output by 100X

Meta has unveiled a new AI system designed to help businesses automate customer support, sales, and daily operations across its messaging platforms. The company said the new Meta Business Agent could help companies increase output by "10X or 100X" through AI-driven automation and personalized customer engagement. The rollout expands Meta's push into enterprise AI tools as competition intensifies among major tech companies building AI systems for businesses. Meta said companies can deploy the agent within minutes or connect it directly to existing enterprise infrastructure. Meta said more than one million businesses already use AI-powered agents on WhatsApp and Messenger to communicate with customers around the clock. The company now plans to expand those capabilities globally to businesses of all sizes. The Business Agent can answer customer questions, recommend products from catalogs, schedule appointments, qualify leads, and help close sales. Businesses can also decide when a human employee should take over a conversation. Meta is also extending the service to Instagram. Businesses can activate the tool through Instagram and other Meta business platforms. The company said access remains free for now, though paid subscription tiers will launch in the coming months. The company highlighted localization as a major feature. Business Agents can respond in customers' preferred languages and match a company's communication style. Meta said the system allows businesses to "show up for every customer" without needing to dramatically expand support teams. Meta also positioned the Business Agent as an operational assistant for business owners and employees. The AI tool can generate morning briefings that summarize missed customer conversations and surface insights from ongoing message threads. Meta said it is initially testing those features with select businesses using WhatsApp Business, Messenger, Instagram Pro, and Meta Business Suite. The company plans to expand the assistant's capabilities further. Future versions could support market research, product analysis, calendar management, and competitive intelligence tasks. Meta said the long-term goal is to reduce operational overhead while helping smaller businesses handle enterprise-scale workloads. Alongside the launch, Meta introduced the Meta Business Agent Platform, which provides infrastructure for businesses deploying AI agents at scale. The platform lets businesses customize and manage AI agents while connecting them with external systems such as Shopify, Zendesk, and Shopee. Meta said those integrations will allow agents to perform actions directly on behalf of businesses instead of only responding to messages. The company also added enterprise-grade controls, measurement tools, and built-in guardrails for larger organizations. Meta is additionally working to improve business discovery inside WhatsApp. Users will soon be able to search for businesses directly through the app or share business contact cards in chats. The company believes those discovery features could help businesses attract new customers while maintaining faster response times through AI-powered support systems. The announcement marks another step in Meta's broader effort to expand generative AI across its consumer and business ecosystem as messaging platforms increasingly evolve into commerce hubs.

Meta Targets Business AI Market With Agents That Close Sales | PYMNTS.com

The new Meta Business Agent is based on one that is already being used by businesses on WhatsApp and Messenger. Now, it's being expanded to businesses of all sizes globally and to Instagram, the company said in a Wednesday (June 3) press release. Meta Business Agent responds in customers' local languages and can answer questions, make product recommendations, book appointments, qualify incoming leads and close sales. The agent can also let the business decide when a team member should step in to provide support, according to the release. The agent can also provide businesses with a briefing that will summarize its recent chats and provide insights. Meta plans to expand the agent's capabilities so that it can conduct market research, surface product insights, connect with tools to manage the user's calendar and provide competitive intelligence. Meta Business Agent is free to businesses at launch but will become a paid subscription offering in the coming months. Meta also announced Wednesday that it is introducing an agentic platform that helps businesses build, customize and deploy Business Agents at scale; connect to Shopify, Zendesk, Shopee and other systems so the agents can take action on behalf of the business; and, for larger businesses, use enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and measurement. The Meta Business Agent Platform works alongside WhatsApp's Business Platform and supports Messenger and Instagram, per the release. Clara Shih, who was Meta's head of business AI at the time and is now senior advisor, told CNBC in March 2025 that Meta was planning a major expansion of its AI offerings for businesses that use its social media and other platforms. "Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7," Shih said. The Meta Business Agent arrives at a time when Meta is targeting enterprise AI as it seeks to add new revenue streams.

Meta dives into enterprise AI race with new business agent

STORY: Shares of Meta rose more than 3% in morning trading on Wednesday, after the social media giant unveiled an AI agent designed to help businesses carry out day-to-day operations. The move marks Meta's latest push into the fast-growing enterprise AI market. Mark Zuckerberg's company said the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling "agentic" capabilities in which the assistant can, for example, book calendar appointments and close sales on behalf of businesses. It said more than 1 million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of such agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will be added to Instagram as well. The move hints at Meta's ambitions to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market for enterprise applications of its AI tools, leveraging the reach of its WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps. The company is also launching a broader "Business Agent Platform" aimed at giving businesses the tools to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere. That platform is connected to hundreds of non-Meta systems, including Shopify.