The new organization will target both small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and corporate clients, The Information reported Monday (Nov. 9), citing a source familiar with the matter and job postings viewed by the news outlet.
This comes as Meta is planning to spend up to $145 billion in capital expenditures this year alone to support its AI infrastructure.
The company in September introduced the Meta Enterprise Platform, a new business unit concentrating on selling software products—including the Muse Code coding tool, business agent software and Muse Spark models—to corporate customers and developers.
Former MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai has been appointed to head the unit, which Zuckerberg termed the company’s “next major pillar,” the report said.
To accelerate corporate deployment and lessen its reliance on its internal engineers, Meta is also forging strategic partnerships with major consulting firms and systems integrators, including Accenture, Deloitte and IBM, the report said, comparing it to enterprise sales strategies used by competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The commercial push reflects more than a year of market testing which AI products businesses were interested in. In 2024, Meta saw strong demand from SMBs using its automated customer agents to manage inquiries 24/7 and free up employee time.
However, securing large enterprise deals remains challenging. Meta’s previous enterprise initiatives, such as its Workplace communication software—which reached 7 million paid subscribers at its peak in 2021 before Meta announced its discontinuation in 2024—struggled to compete against Microsoft and Slack.
Moreover, an October pitch encouraging retailers like Amazon and Booking.com to place Meta’s business agent on their websites faced resistance, sources said, as companies balked at giving Meta wider access to their customers and were working on their own in-house AI projects.
In related news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 60% of SMBs using AI said it lets them produce more without bringing on more employees.
According to the October report “New Data Shows Small Businesses Use AI to Grow Without Hiring,” 16% of growing businesses reported skipping a full-time hire because of AI, versus 10% of businesses seeing flat revenue.
“The findings suggested that AI’s most consequential labor market impact may not be the employees that companies eliminate, but the positions they no longer need to create,” PYMMTS wrote last month. “As automation makes routine work cheaper, the same forces reducing demand for labor may be creating a new market for human judgment and accountability, something harder to automate.”
