Meta doesn’t come up as often in discussions about top AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from the growing interest in the technology. Mehta said on Wednesday’s first-quarter conference call that the company’s business AI tools enabled about 10 million conversations a week as of late March, up from 1 million at the beginning of this year.
This growth is due to the company’s recent expansion of its business AI assistant beta program in the US, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America.
Meta hasn’t yet monetized its business AI tools and is offering them for free to small businesses to help them scale, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that that could change in the near future.
“Currently, business AI is available for free to most businesses in our messaging apps, but as we advance further, we look forward to working to establish long-term monetization models,” Zuckerberg said on a conference call.
Meta is building AI capabilities into a suite of business products on a variety of platforms and is committed to powering these products with a new large-scale language model, Muse Spark. Muse Spark is the first model to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division, which was established last year.
The company said creative AI tools performed well during the quarter. “Use of our ad creative tools is also growing, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, with particularly high adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are also benefiting performance, with advertisers using our video generation capabilities seeing over 3% higher conversion rates in testing,” CFO Susan Lee said on the conference call.
The company is also launching an open beta of its Meta Ads AI Connectors this week. This will allow advertisers to connect their meta ad accounts to AI agents.
Zuckerberg noted that the company’s apps generated a total of $885 million in revenue in the quarter, largely due to demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions to the company’s apps. Earlier this month, the company began testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds.
The company reported profit of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion in the year-ago period. Sales were $56.3 billion, an increase of 33% from the previous year.
