Meta launches initiative to support entrepreneurship with AI tools for 250 million small businesses

Meta launches new initiative to support entrepreneurship, drive AI adoption | TechCrunch

Meta is launching Meta Small Business, a new company-wide initiative focused on supporting entrepreneurship and driving AI adoption, Axios reported on Wednesday. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff that small businesses have always been a big part of the company's business model, and that tens of millions of entrepreneurs already use its platforms to grow and connect with customers. The company now plans to do more in the space. "In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses," Zuckerberg wrote. "We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence." Axios reports that Meta Small Business will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit. Zuckerberg has asked product managers, designers, engineers, and other employees to reach out if they're interested in working on the new initiative.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta rolls out Small Business initiative to drive AI adoption among MSMEs - The Economic Times

The new initiative signals Zuckerberg's strategic push to build on one of Meta's core strengths amid intensifying AI competition. Per a December 2025 report, 92% of businesses using the company's platforms in India are MSMEs.Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms has launched 'Meta Small Business,' a new top-level initiative aimed at driving the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) among its small-business clients. According to Axios, which first reported the announcement, Zuckerberg has called the initiative a company-wide priority and asked employees across verticals to "reach out" to join the project. Under the initiative, the company aims to help small business owners build and grow using Meta's AI models and tools. "Small businesses have always been the majority of our business model. Tens of millions of entrepreneurs use our platforms every day to connect with customers and grow. We've already built the leading tools in this space, and now we're going to do more. In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this," Zuckerberg wrote in an internal note, as per Axios. The move signals Zuckerberg's strategic push to build on one of Meta's core strengths amid intensifying AI competition. While rivals like Google and Microsoft focus on large-scale enterprise offerings, Meta is leaning into its vast base of small business users. More than 250 million small businesses globally use the company's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Per Axios, the initiative will be led by recently appointed Meta president and vice-chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit. This is particularly significant for Meta's India presence. In a December 2025 report, the company had revealed that 92% of businesses using its platforms in India are MSMEs. The announcement comes on the same day that The Information reported that Meta is laying off a few hundred employees across teams, including Reality Labs, social media, and recruiting. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of December 31, according to its CY2025 annual filing. The restructuring and the new small business initiative come as Meta seeks to manage rising costs from aggressive AI investments and higher pay for top talent. The company has projected total expenses of $162 billion to $169 billion in 2026.

Meta Aims to Share AI Intelligence With Small Business Users | PYMNTS.com

Meta Small Business is aimed at the more than 250 million small businesses around the world that use the company's social media programs, Axios reported Wednesday (March 25), citing an internal memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses," Zuckerberg wrote. "We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence." He added that small businesses have always been a majority of the company's business model, with tens of millions of entrepreneurs connecting with customers each day on its platforms. According to Axios, the program will be headed by three top executives, including Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and Naomi Gleit, head of product. PYMNTS has written about how AI is allowing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enjoy some of the same advantages as their larger counterparts. "The unlock is going to be tremendous. AI is going to enable people to explore dreams and passions they never thought of before. ... I think it's a huge, huge equalizer," René Lacerte, CEO and founder of BILL, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster during a conversation last year. "We'll [soon] be talking about the Fortune 500 wanting the agility of the Fortune 5 million." More recently, PYMNTS has examined the need for SMBs to embrace newer technologies, as some of these businesses find themselves held back by legacy processes. For example, the PYMNTS Intelligence/Mastercard report "Ready for Change: Why Nearly Half of SMBs Want to Ditch Cash and Checks," found that 52% of the payments that Gen Z-owned SMBs make are in cash, in spite of the prevalence of digital tools. "Individually, these legacy frictions may seem trivial. Collectively, they create a hierarchy of convenience," PYMNTS wrote. Much like consumers paying bills, accounts payable departments often prioritize the transactions that are easiest to complete. A vendor that offers a one-click payment link or a pre-populated payment form can often move ahead of those that require manual processing. That means the ease of completing the payment has become part of the product.

Inside Meta's play to turn 250M SMBs into AI customers

The tech giant is launching Meta Small Business, an aggressive initiative offering the 250 million small and medium businesses that use its platform a suite of new AI tools. The company is betting that smaller enterprises will drive its next growth phase as its core ad business faces mounting legal heat. "Small businesses have always been the largest category of our business," Zuckerberg wrote in an internal post on Wednesday that was reviewed by NYNext. "In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this." The initiative will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit, reporting directly to Zuckerberg. The pair will build on a base of over 300 million small businesses already running on Meta's platforms -- Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. "I've seen firsthand that small business owners don't fear new challenges -- they're resourceful, creative, and relentlessly solution-oriented," Powell McCormick told NYNext. The play comes amid an intensifying AI arms race, with tech titans scrambling to stake out territory as the advertising and marketing landscape changes and consumers embrace products like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT. The push taps into an untapped AI market: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) spend over $400 billion annually on digital marketing and business tools. While larger enterprise clients have embraced sophisticated AI solutions, smaller operations have been less of a focus, despite representing the vast majority of global businesses. Meta is well-positioned in this space: many small businesses are already using Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for advertising and promotion. Rather than asking SMBs to learn new AI platforms, Meta is unveiling tools that are integrated into the platforms they already use and will automate the most time-consuming tasks, such as generating personalized responses to customer inquiries across Facebook and Instagram and creating social media content. This is the second multifunctional division to be announced this year at Meta. In January, Zuckerberg unveiled Meta Compute, the company's $600 billion investment in American infrastructure and jobs. The moves show that Zuck is taking a hands-on approach to the company's AI infrastructure strategy to pioneer its next phase of growth. The company faces competition from Google Business tools and Microsoft 365's AI integration. While those platforms focus on productivity software, Meta's advantage lies in customer-facing marketing tools where SMBs spend most of their digital energy -- and budget. This product comes as Meta faces mounting regulatory scrutiny that could threaten its advertising business. Just yesterday, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company willfully violated state consumer protection laws by failing to protect children from predators on Facebook and Instagram. The landmark verdict, which Meta plans to appeal, adds to ongoing antitrust investigations across multiple jurisdictions, privacy violation penalties, and content moderation lawsuits that have created uncertainty around the company's traditional revenue streams, pushing the company to diversify. The small business focus comes as Meta has cut hundreds of jobs in its Metaverse division, signaling a strategic shift toward AI applications with clearer revenue potential. "We are empowering the millions of entrepreneurs already using our platforms with product solutions and tools to help them grow," Powell McCormick told NYNext.