Meta Platforms officially kicked off its enterprise artificial intelligence efforts on Wednesday with a new business agent to assist companies in managing daily business operations directly within WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The announcement was made during the company’s recent WhatsApp-centric “Conversations” event in London, where Meta unveiled the new AI assistant, which will be used in more than just a chatbot application. This new agent can take real action on a business’s behalf: make calendar appointments, qualify sales leads, even close the transaction. This is a natural but daring progression for anyone that has run a small business page or handled a ton of customer enquiries from a variety of channels. I’ve come to understand how tiring it is for shop owners and freelancers to respond to the same question on and off the site, and also the sales process itself. Meta apparently saw the same annoyance and wanted to create something that would solve it.
Meta said over one million businesses are already using the previous versions of these agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will also be seen on Instagram and will be available worldwide for any company, big or small, and solo entrepreneurs. The action is a sign of Meta’s aim to go head-to-head with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the enterprise AI category. Instead of creating a new work environment from the ground up, Meta is harnessing the reach of its social media apps to make the case for businesses to consolidate their advertising, customer service, and operations all in one location. “This is definitely an enterprise play,” Meta head of product Naomi Gleit told Reuters at the conference’s sidelines. The fact that her words come from Meta, a company that has been experimenting with automated messaging for businesses for years makes them more meaningful because the technology has now come to a point where it can handle more complicated, agentic tasks.
The Business Agent can be personalized to suit a company’s exact tone and voice, offering responses to well-known queries, directing more intricate inquiries to human agents and even accepting payments. The tool will be free for businesses for the first couple of months, and then will be offered as a subscription later this year. “Well, we want to take actions now. We want it to be able to do the payment, to process the booking, to place the order,” explained Gleit when asked about the change in emphasis. She said these contrasted with automations that were “based on rules” and would bounce customers off systematic menus. That is important because some business owners have become frustrated about the “clunky” chatbots that have become a hindrance instead of a help. Meta’s new agent is going to be like a dependable employee not a phone tree.
In addition to the in-app agents, Meta also introduced a more comprehensive Business Agent Platform that enables businesses to create their own AI agents to use in their operations outside of the Meta ecosystem. There are hundreds of non Meta systems that this platform can connect to and a company can use it on their website, help desk software, and online store. The enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and performance measurement tools will also be available to larger companies. The initiatives are being led by a new team, called Enterprise Solutions, a recent company-wide restructuring focusing on AI that is spearheaded by Gleit. That team will be a group of deployed engineers who will be alongside enterprise customers, as is done by other AI firms such as Anthropic that embed their engineers within the organization to address politics and write custom code that helps AI models achieve results. This team is primarily dedicated to business agents, but is now also looking to create and sell agentic AI products for other business functions.
Gleit also said she’s focused on streamlining the various AI tools Meta has developed over the years, including internal ones for workflow, a new user-facing AI assistant called Meta AI, and a separate AI-powered ads assistant for business users that was rolled out across the globe last month. “People say to me over and over, ‘I just want to go to one place, that can do all the things,’” she said. You need to make things modular, you also have to be willing to change, she added, because technology is changing at a very rapid pace.” This is due to the fact that there’s no two companies that are exactly alike, so it makes sense that they need to be modular. The clothing store can’t use the same automations as the dental office or the freelance design agency.
