Meta business AI tools facilitate 10 million weekly conversations as adoption scales globally
The social media giant reports strong uptake of its GenAI ad creative tools and a robust first-quarter profit, while hinting at future monetisation strategies for its business AI suite.
Meta has reported that its business AI tools facilitated approximately 10 million conversations per week as of late March, representing a tenfold increase from the one million conversations recorded at the start of the year. This substantial growth coincides with the recent expansion of the beta program for the company's business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regions.
While the company is currently offering these tools for free to small businesses to achieve scale, CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated a potential shift towards a monetisation model in the future. During the first-quarter conference call, Zuckerberg noted that business AIs are currently free for most businesses on Meta's messaging apps, but the company expects to work towards establishing a longer-term monetisation model as they make further progress.
The surge in usage is powered by Muse Spark, the first large language model released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division. This technology is being used to power Meta's suite of business products, which have seen solid traction in the quarter as the company integrates AI capabilities across various platforms.
Advertising adoption has also seen significant momentum, with over 8 million advertisers utilising at least one of Meta's GenAI ad creative tools during the quarter. CFO Susan Li highlighted particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses, noting that advertisers using the video generation feature demonstrated more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests compared to previous methods.
To further support this ecosystem, Meta launched the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week. This new feature enables advertisers to connect their Meta ad accounts directly to an AI agent, streamlining the creative process and allowing for more efficient management of campaigns.
Financially, the quarter proved robust for the company. Meta's apps generated $885 million in revenue, driven largely by demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and app subscriptions. The company reported a total profit of $26.8 billion for the quarter, an increase from $16.6 billion the previous year, with total revenue reaching $56.3 billion, a 33% rise from the prior year.
