Meta wants AI agents to be the next advertising business

AI For Business


Meta wants AI agents to be the next advertising business
Meta wants AI agents to be the next advertising business – Moby

Main points

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Meta is fully committed to agent AI as a strategy to diversify revenue from its core business of advertising sales. This comes after CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the idea of ​​becoming a cloud computing business is “definitely on the table.”

If companies bite into meta AI agents, they might convince Wall Street that the billions of dollars they’re spending on infrastructure will someday be worth it.

what happened

On Wednesday, WSJ reported that Meta launched an AI agent for businesses across three of its most popular platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. AI agents are tasked with doing things that human assistants do, such as answering customer questions, making reservations, managing calendars, and even market research.

Considering Zacks just raised its total capital spending by 67% in 2025 (jumping from $38.4 billion to $72.2 billion) and doubled this year with a whopping new guidance of $125 billion to $145 billion, it makes sense to liquidate the entire college graduate job market with AI agents. Approximately 200 million small and medium-sized businesses use WhatsApp, each with a unique internal number. In December, the company announced that its “annual run rate for paid messaging services on its platform exceeded $2 billion.”

The market certainly exists, but what about the users?

Facebook has about 3.2 billion monthly active users, which is about 40% of all humans if the company’s numbers are to be believed. WhatsApp and Instagram have around 3 billion monthly active users, while Messenger has around 1 billion.

Why is it important?

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There is one reason for this. Because Meta will soon need customers from these companies who will be using AI agents.

In the digital mall that Facebook and Instagram have evolved into, if there are no people there, there is no work for agents to do. Meta knows it has users and that if one company starts using agent AI and shows even the slightest sign of success, others will follow. And in true big tech fashion, Meta will first let businesses use these agents for free, then move to various levels of paid subscription services. They are already doing this through their expanded “Meta Verified program” on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Their tactic is not surprising since this program was originally created and designed to combat impersonation via Twitter-like blue checkmarks.

Meta’s agent AI push may not only justify spending on AI infrastructure. The company’s core advertising business, which accounts for about 98% of total revenue, is showing cracks.

In the first quarter of this year, Meta saw a slight decline in daily active users of 20 million across its platforms (3.58 billion daily active users compared to 3.56 billion in Q4 2025) due to geopolitical restrictions in Russia and Iran and increased regulation of youth access in markets such as Australia. If these trends continue, Meta’s advertisers will be the first to be hit, not Meta. When Daily Active Users (DAP) decrease, the cost of ad slots skyrockets. This was evident in Meta’s first quarter results, where average price per ad increased 12% year-over-year. Putting in the necessary spending for Meta’s Meta One ($7.99 to $49.99 per month) will put more pressure on advertisers than ever before. This could lead to a slow exodus of both as margins become so tight that it becomes difficult to turn a profit and people continue to leave the platform, fed up with being bombarded with more ads than ever before.

All of this helped Meta’s ad revenue reach $55 billion in the first quarter, up 33% year-over-year. But at a point where something could break, it makes even more sense that Meta is working now to diversify its revenue for when that happens.

what’s next

Meta is smart to find secondary use cases outside of ad spend on the three most popular social platforms. The market has been keeping an eye on Meta’s average revenue per user (ARPU) and its “other revenue” segment, which recently posted a 74% year-over-year increase to $855 million thanks to WhatsApp paid messaging. With AI business agents running on a consumption-based, token-driven model, Meta can effectively charge businesses for compute usage while offsetting the cost of AI infrastructure and potentially capturing a portion of transactions.

Like everything in AI and data centers, it will take time, but once it gets off the ground, Meta could eventually win the race for AI agents.



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