Meta Says Advertisers Want Better AI Chatbots

A top Meta executive says AI chatbots will help draw businesses as well as users.

“There’s a huge demand from business for better tools,” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said Tuesday (Oct. 17) at the WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, Calif.

“One of the most profoundly impactful applications for the near term for AI is helping businesses be more effective,” added Cox, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News.

Meta last month debuted 28 new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot personas, a new generation of smart glasses, and more AI experiences designed, as PYMNTS wrote, “to create some competitive separation” from its Big Tech rivals who have launched their own AI products.

The new offerings were rolled out during the company’s Meta Connect event, with the AI chatbot personalities including digital personas played by celebrities and cultural icons including Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka.

According to Bloomberg, the company is now looking at ways to make money from AI, calling this pivot a “signature move” for Meta: finding ways to monetize new features through advertisers soon after their release, as it has with Stories on Instagram and its chat apps.

But as noted here, “while Meta has long been leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) technology behind the scenes to streamline and personalize things like digital ads and content recommendations, the overall industry consensus from the outside looking in is that the tech giant is falling behind other tech companies like Google and OpenAI, who were quickly able to bring to market standalone AI products.”

Meta earlier this month introduced generative AI features designed to help advertisers create and optimize their ad campaigns. Among them are Background Generation, which lets advertisers create multiple backgrounds that complement their product images, and Text Variations, which generates multiple versions of ad texts based on the advertiser’s original copy.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS Intelligence finds that consumers increasingly rely on AI to help them in their daily lives, even as they worry the technology might cost them their privacy, the chance for human interactions, and even their jobs.

For example, “consumers show keen interest in AI involvement in their traveling, as evidenced by the increase in digital travel-planning tools helping to craft personalized travel itineraries and generative AI chatbots assisting in flight bookings in several languages, which all create smoother and more personalized experiences for travelers,” PYMNTS wrote.

In all, 66% of consumers have at least some interest in AI-enabled forms of entertainment, 65% in AI-enabled communication and shopping and close to 63% in AI-enabled travel.