Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pitching investors on a bold vision for the future—one where, within five years, billions of people will each have their own personal AI agents. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents—without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.)

“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example—whatever period of time you want—that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg said during Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call. He added that he envisions people using these agents for tasks like managing finances, health, relationships, and household duties. “As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important,” he noted, pointing out that WhatsApp is already the leading platform for users engaging with Meta AI.

Meta isn’t alone in betting big on AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf rather than just answer questions. Google highlighted custom AI agents as a key feature in its Search overhaul, though that move sparked backlash from users overwhelmed by the constant flood of AI results. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have surged as engineers praise the agentic coding assistant Claude Code. But compared to its rivals, Meta may face more skepticism from investors as it continues pouring money into innovative projects that may or may not pay off—Meta’s stock dropped nearly 10% after posting this quarter’s earnings.

Meta’s Reality Labs, the division behind its AR glasses, VR headsets, and related software, lost about $4.6 billion this quarter, roughly in line with its quarterly losses since 2021. That brings the running total to around $88 billion. Meta’s AI spending is expected to climb even higher, which raises more concern at this point. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion in the same period last year—a 91% year-over-year drop, driven largely by investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.

“We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there’s a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well,” Zuckerberg said. Ultimately, he believes the personal agents Meta is developing will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead.”

So far, Meta’s business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than one million businesses. Getting consumers to embrace AI agents may prove more difficult, but the road to “billions” has to start somewhere—the company can’t reach that goal on enterprise agents alone.