Meta Wants to Be Your Intern, Assistant and Boss

Meta launched a business AI agent on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told at a conference in London that it will “eventually help you run your whole business,” The Wall Street Journal reported. But can it? Also, would you want it to?

The artificial intelligence agent handles customer questions, appointment booking and sales, per the WSJ, with market research, competitive intelligence and calendar management said to come once Meta’s models advance further.

Just a week earlier, Meta revealed plans to form an Enterprise Solutions unit to embed engineers inside corporate clients, PYMNTS reported. Zuckerberg also told shareholders a cloud computing business is “definitely on the table,” per a CNBC report. And as TechCrunch reported, Meta last week launched consumer AI subscriptions priced at $7.99 and $19.99 per month.

The Pattern

Meta raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion after Q1 2026 earnings, nearly double its 2025 spend, while recording its first-ever sequential decline in daily active users.

Advertising still accounts for roughly 97% of its revenue, as it has for two decades. Per an April eMarketer report, Meta is projected to generate $243 billion in advertising revenue in 2026, overtaking Google as the world’s largest digital ad seller. The core business has never been stronger.

That strength is what makes these pivots possible. It also makes it difficult to know whether Meta is genuinely building new revenue models or using ad profits to construct a story investors need to hear as capital expenditure doubles.

Enterprise Is Harder Than Meta Makes It Sound

Enterprise software is a different business from consumer social media and advertising. It requires dedicated sales infrastructure, security and compliance capabilities and deep integration with the workflow systems companies already run on, none of which Meta has built.

Enterprise customers don’t evaluate software the way consumers download apps. They run procurement cycles that take months, involve legal and security reviews, require SLA guarantees and demand proof of integration with the ERP, CRM and compliance systems their businesses already depend on. A company whose entire go-to-market has been built around selling ad inventory to marketers has no muscle memory for any of that.

CNBC described the business agent as Meta’s effort to move beyond ads and generate revenue from AI.

In 2021, Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta and declared the metaverse the “next frontier,” predicting it would reach a billion people within a decade. Fortune reported that Reality Labs accumulated over $80 billion in losses before Meta wound it down and pivoted to AI.

The business agent, the enterprise unit, the cloud ambitions and the subscriptions arrive with the same register of certainty. Zuckerberg has been consistent in making the next thing sound inevitable. What he’s less consistent on is delivering it. Investors who sat through the metaverse have seen what that register is worth.

The business agent may yet prove to be different. WhatsApp’s distribution is real, the commercial base is growing, and the underlying AI models are improving. But the distance between a capable customer service tool and a system that runs your whole business is very tall claim.