Meta scents next billion-dollar business in AI agents

Given billions in AI investments, Meta is increasingly looking for ways to monetize its apps and AI technology.

Just last week, Meta announced new paid offerings for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, including plans for the AI assistant Meta AI. Yesterday, it announced that it would make its own AI agent for businesses using WhatsApp for customer communication available worldwide and offer it for a fee in the future. And in the near future, an AI agent for end consumers could be added, reports The Information.

Meta is thus moving away from its traditional advertising business and delving deeper into the agentic AI market, where providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are already competing for paying private and business customers.

Meta launches AI agents for customer contact

With the business agent, Meta is positioning itself in the enterprise agent market. Unlike many competitors, the company is initially focusing on customer communication via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram rather than general work assistants.

Meta has been testing the AI agent in selected markets for some time. According to the company, more than a million businesses are already using it on WhatsApp and Messenger to answer customer inquiries. Meta is now making the Business Agent, which can recommend products, book appointments, close sales, and involve employees when needed, available worldwide and expanding its availability to Instagram.

The company is also testing functions that will allow the AI agent to act more as a work assistant for businesses. These include daily summaries of missed chats and analyses of ongoing conversations. According to Meta, these functions will initially be tested with selected companies.

The use of the business agent is currently still free. However, Meta plans to introduce paid plans for the AI service in the coming months. Larger companies will pay usage-based fees, depending on the number and complexity of interactions, reports the Financial Times, among others. Meta is thus following a trend in the AI industry, where providers are increasingly relying on usage-based billing models. With more than 200 million small businesses using WhatsApp for customer communication, according to Meta, the business agent could become a lucrative business for the company.

“Hatch”: AI agent for everyone

Under the internal name Hatch, Meta is also working on an agentic AI service for end consumers, intended as a more accessible version of the agent tool OpenClaw, reports The Information.

Unlike the Business Agent, which is initially focused on Meta's own platforms, Hatch is intended to be able to perform tasks beyond them, such as scheduling calendar appointments, sending emails, or creating simple software tools via text input, according to The Information. For a premium version of the AI service, Meta is reportedly considering a price of up to $200 per month. This would put Meta in direct competition with high-priced AI subscriptions from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, the pricing has not yet been definitively decided. A concrete launch date also apparently has not yet been set.

For Meta, these initiatives are about more than just new AI features: the company must demonstrate that its billions in AI spending can also translate into standalone paid products. The pressure is high: capital investments could reach up to $145 billion this year, according to Meta.

(mho)