A day after blasting OpenAI and Anthropic for hoarding information, the drama surrounding Meta’s Q2 earnings call centered around how he would follow up. Listeners didn’t have to wait long for the answer.
“It’s extremely unlikely, if you look out five years from now, that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s second quarter earnings call Wednesday (July 29), describing software “working on your behalf 24/7” across health, finances, relationships and careers.
That vision, for every one of Meta’s 3.6 billion daily users to have an assistant that never clocks out dominated Meta’s earnings call. Zuckerberg spent his opening remarks describing a future where personal agents handle everything from health to finances, and the rest of the call built directly on that premise: how Meta pays for it, what stands in the way, and why the company believes it will win anyway.
The vision runs into a hard constraint almost immediately: supply. “There’s just nowhere near enough compute for all the demand,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that Meta is fielding offers to sell its own capacity at a premium but prefers to build intelligence on top of it instead, where the margins run higher.
That scarcity is why Meta is racing to stand up the agent layer now, even in pieces. Meta Superintelligence Labs shipped its Muse Spark 1.1 and Muse Image models this quarter, and daily interactions with the Meta AI assistant have climbed sharply since it’s rebuild. Business agents are already live for more than a million businesses on WhatsApp and Messenger, handling customer inquiries and completed sales without a person in the loop.
Zuckerberg pointed to Brazilian rental company Movida as the model he wants to replicate: a WhatsApp agent that runs the entire booking flow start to finish, resolving the vast majority of conversations without human help. That is the pattern Meta is betting will scale to billions of people next.
Zuckerberg’s Case for Why Meta Wins the AI Bet
Scarce compute raises an obvious question: Why should Meta, rather than a rival, end up owning this? Zuckerberg’s answer rests on distribution and the flywheel it creates. “When we have a product and a format that works, I would go as far as to say that I think we’re probably the best company in the world at scaling those experiences to billions of people,” he said, describing how usage data feeds back into the models that improve the products.
He did not pretend the wager was small. “I get that this is a big investment and it’s a big bet,” Zuckerberg said. “My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time.”
That confidence is the thesis the entire call built toward: an ad business strong enough to fund an all-in push into personal agents, aimed at a future Zuckerberg is convinced is coming regardless of who builds it.
What Else Stood Out
- Meta hired Kunal Shah, founder of Indian payments company CRED, as its new head of WhatsApp. Zuckerberg said Shah built one of India’s largest payment companies.
- Instagram reached 2 billion daily active users. Threads crossed 500 million monthly actives, which Zuckerberg called the fastest-growing conversation app ever.
- WhatsApp peaked at 30 million messages sent per second during the World Cup final, an all-time record for the platform.
- AI-driven ranking improvements increased ad clicks and conversions across Meta’s platforms. Advantage+ automated campaigns continue to scale as a core part of ad delivery
- Meta launched Meta One, a new subscription offering more tools and AI features across its apps, with plans to add further tiers and pricing options
- Zuckerberg revealed that every public Reels and Feed post on Instagram is now automatically run through an LLM and analyzed across dimensions like topic and tone, a milestone the company hit this year.
Topline Growth and Future Outlook
Meta reported total revenue of $60.8 billion for the quarter, up 28% year over year, with advertising revenue of $59.4 billion, up 27%. Ad impressions grew 14% and the average price per ad rose 12%. Family of apps other revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time, up 73%.
Capital expenditures for the quarter reached $31.1 billion, while free cash flow came in at $784 million. Meta ended the quarter with $90.3 billion in cash and marketable securities against $83.7 billion in debt, and headcount stood at roughly 75,000, down 3%, reflecting about 8,000 employees affected by May’s reduction.
Looking ahead, Meta guided to third-quarter 2026 revenue of $61 billion to $64 billion, full-year 2026 expenses of $165 billion to $169 billion, and full-year 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion, with the floor raised from its prior outlook.
The company did not provide specific guidance for 2027 capex.
