Meta's Business AI: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement for Companies of All Sizes

Meta Expects 'Every Business' to Begin Using Agentic AI | PYMNTS.com

Meta is reportedly planning a major expansion of its AI offerings for business users. The company's artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by more than 700 million customers, and Meta hopes to offer it to "hundreds of millions" of businesses, Clara Shih, the tech giant's head of business AI, said in an interview with CNBC Thursday (March 6). "Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we're building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that's happening," Shih said. "We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses." Although major companies are investing millions in AI models, the 200 small businesses using Meta's social media platforms don't have that luxury, added Shih. "They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships," she said. "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." PYMNTS examined the role AI agents play in retail last month in an interview with Keith Kirkpatrick, research director of enterprise applications at The Futurum Group. He said that in time, AI agents will affect some retail job functions, but that most of those tasks are digital and not physical. "As such, many of these functions are still marketing- or commerce-based, and retailers will be looking to companies in adjacent industries to see how well AI agents from Salesforce, Microsoft, and others are delivering value to their customers," said Kirkpatrick. He added that the most important question is whether retailers will make the investment in technology that is still relatively new and in many ways, hasn't demonstrated ROI. "Margins are thin, and I think there will need to be fairly significant ROI examples that are directly relevant to retailers, in order to drive early adoption. I think pricing will be important, and AI agent pricing will need to be tied to specific metrics or outcomes," he said.

Meta's New Business AI Will Help You Sell Stuff to Customers

In a press roundtable, Clara Shih, the former Salesforce AI CEO who now leads Meta's Business AI group, said that she envisions a world in which AI becomes as fundamental to the act of running a business as having an official company email address. The first step toward that future is a new product called Business AI. Over 600 million conversations occur every day between consumers and brands on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, according to Meta, which owns all three platforms. The data shows that people want to have their questions about a product answered before committing to a purchase, but for smaller businesses with only a few or even just one employee, Shih says, fielding questions online can eat into a business owners' valuable time. Business AI, says Shih, is designed to enable companies of any size to keep consumers engaged without spending their whole day sending messages. Meta can analyze all of a brand's conversations with customers, and connect with external data sources such as a product catalogue, or sales strategy documents, to inform their Business AI's personality and sales strategy. The entire setup process is simple enough to be completed on a mobile device, according to Shih.

Meta wants to give small businesses an AI boost with a customer support agent for Instagram and Facebook

Soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta's AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI -- including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user -- at a conference Tuesday morning. "We are at an amazing and historic moment," said Clara Shih, the VP of Business AI at Meta. "We are on the cusp of AI being in the hands of every consumer and every business." Over 600 million conversations between a person and a business occur in a day on all of Meta's social platforms. With its new pilot program, Meta hopes to utilize its Llama AI model to help entrepreneurs and small business owners scale their businesses.

Meta is targeting 'hundreds of millions' of businesses in agentic AI deployment

Top Meta AI executive Clara Shih on preparing for AI inside every job and business Meta Platforms is among the U.S. tech giants leading the race to invest in generative AI and the foundational large language models that the AI breakthroughs rely on, and it's also taken an open-source approach to its AI development, allowing the tech innovations to be shared widely. Those innovations are occurring rapidly. "Not just daily. It's evolving multiple times a day," says Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta. Its Llama LLMs, available to developers around the world, have been downloaded over 800 million times. Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents, the latest trend in generative AI. The AI agents won't just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action -- surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that's where Shih comes in. Meta's AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses. "Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we're building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that's happening," she told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series. She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide. "We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses," Shih said. While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, "doing fancy things like fine tuning models," as Shih put it, "If you're a small business -- you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you're distributing through Instagram -- you don't have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won't have to." For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life. For consumers, Shih says, "Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends." Rival OpenAI recently launched its Operator AI for tasks like travel planning. On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. "They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. 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." The more AI does, the less people have to do, at least in traditional definitions of roles. Shih says every person must prepare now for the changes that will be coming. "There isn't a single job that hasn't been completely transformed by the internet and by mobile and by social media. I think we're at the same juncture now with AI, where it's clear that there are certain professions where AI will significantly change the job. But my prediction is that over time, AI will change every job function across every industry," she told Boorstin. Her advice for every individual and every company is "to learn, to experiment, to understand and to almost define what that [AI transformation] could look like for their particular job." "Just like in 1990 we had to learn email, we had to learn search. I think today, everyone, regardless of where they live, what job they have or want to have, needs to learn AI," she said. The good news? According to Shih, AI makes it easier to learn. "You can talk to it. You can literally talk to it." She's been doing that herself. "Something that I often do is, if there's long research papers, AI research papers, or there's developments, you can ask AI. You can use Meta AI, and it'll break it down for you. You can ask it, 'Explain this at a ninth grade level, explain this at a fifth grade level,' and it'll do it. And you can kind of go back and forth. And so that's how I learn a lot of the more complicated topics."