In June, Meta introduced an AI agent designed for businesses, entering the enterprise AI space with a focus on customer service, support, and routine operations. However, the company’s ambitions in this area go much further, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call. “We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers,” he stated. These new offerings could help Meta generate revenue beyond its primary source—advertising—and its smaller subscription segment. Initially, the company plans to target its existing advertiser base by providing AI agents that operate across messaging platforms and other channels, enabling businesses to interact with customers through an AI interface. “And, just like the ad system, effectively, we will get paid when we deliver results for those businesses,” Zuckerberg explained. “We view this as an extension of the sales and the partnerships that we have with many millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses that use our platforms.”

Zuckerberg also outlined how Meta might eventually expand beyond its core small-business advertiser base by offering its internal tools to external clients. “There are other enterprise customers who I think we’re increasingly going to serve, too,” he said. “We’re building coding and developing and internal productivity tools partially because we need to build them ourselves, and we need to make sure that we have tools that are tuned for ourselves. Now that we have those, we feel like there’s a large opportunity to serve - whether that’s small businesses or larger businesses.” This strategic shift may pose challenges—Zuckerberg admitted that selling to enterprise clients requires a “different muscle” than what Meta has traditionally exercised. Regarding selling compute power to businesses, Meta is balancing revenue needs with its own future plans, though the company noted it can currently sell compute at “a significant premium over what we paid for it.”

Despite this, Zuckerberg warned investors that it “would be foolish” to “sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit.” Instead, he described Meta’s approach as a “portfolio” that blends long-term and short-term strategies for its compute infrastructure. “As we get closer to personal superintelligence, we are going to need hardware that allows you to seamlessly interact with it,” he remarked. The call also highlighted Meta’s significant ambitions around agentic AI—systems that can act on behalf of a person or business rather than merely answering questions. These tools won’t be limited to enterprises; consumers can expect “personal AI agents” and AI-powered smart glasses that interact with their surroundings. Additionally, Meta is leveraging AI, particularly large language models, to accelerate the development of its social app suite. Recent launches include an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a platform for vibe-coded games, and other experimental projects. More are in the pipeline, according to Zuckerberg. “I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” he said. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them to the people who will find them interesting.”