Meta pivots to paid AI agents as advertising revenue faces structural headwinds
With capital expenditure soaring to $72.2 billion in 2025 and guidance for 2026 reaching up to $145 billion, Meta is betting on a subscription-based agent economy to justify its infrastructure spend and offset slowing user growth.
Meta has officially launched business-facing artificial intelligence agents across its three primary platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The move marks a strategic expansion into agentic AI, with the new tools designed to perform tasks traditionally handled by human assistants, including answering customer queries, booking appointments, managing calendars and conducting market research. The launch was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, signalling a tangible shift in how the company intends to monetise its vast user base.
The initiative is driven by a need to diversify revenue streams, as Meta’s core advertising business currently accounts for approximately 98% of total income. While advertising revenue reached $55 billion in the first quarter of this year, representing a 33% year-over-year increase, the company is facing emerging structural challenges. Meta recorded a marginal decline of 20 million daily active users in the first quarter, dropping to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. This contraction was attributed to geopolitical restrictions in Russia and Iran, alongside tighter regulations on teen access in markets such as Australia.
To support this new direction, Meta has significantly increased its infrastructure investment. Capital expenditure for 2025 rose by 67%, climbing from $38.4 billion to $72.2 billion. Looking ahead, the company has set guidance for 2026 capital expenditure between $125 billion and $145 billion. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously indicated that expanding into cloud computing remains a strategic possibility, a sentiment that aligns with the current push to monetise AI infrastructure through business services rather than relying solely on ad inventory.
Meta plans to introduce these agents to businesses initially for free before transitioning to a paid subscription model featuring different tiers. This approach mirrors the company’s existing “Meta Verified” program, which was originally designed to combat impersonation via a blue checkmark but has evolved into a broader monetisation tool. The strategy aims to leverage Meta’s massive reach, with WhatsApp serving approximately 200 million small businesses and the company reporting a $2 billion annual run-rate for paid messaging services on the platform in December.
Investors will be closely monitoring Meta’s “Other Revenue” segment, which posted a 74% year-over-year increase to $855 million in the most recent reporting period, largely driven by WhatsApp paid messaging. As the company shifts towards a consumption-based, token-driven model for its AI agents, it seeks to charge businesses for compute usage while offsetting its heavy infrastructure costs. With the average price per ad increasing by 12% year-over-year in the first quarter, the diversification effort is critical to maintaining margins as advertiser costs rise and user growth stagnates.
