Meta Platforms on Wednesday unveiled an artificial intelligence agent aimed at helping businesses carry out day-to-day operations, positioning the social media giant as a player in the enterprise AI market.
Announced at the company's WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference in London, the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling "agentic" capabilities in which the assistant can take actions like booking calendar appointments and closing sales on behalf of businesses.
The company said more than 1 million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of such agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will be added to Instagram as well and rolled out globally to businesses of all sizes.
The move hints at Meta's ambitions to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google in the market for enterprise applications of its AI tools, leveraging the reach of its WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps.
The Business Agent can be customized to respond to queries on those apps, channeling a company's tone and handling tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, qualifying leads and escalating complex queries to human staff when needed.
Businesses will initially be able to access the tool for free, with paid subscription options planned in the coming months.
"This is definitely an enterprise play," Naomi Gleit, Meta's head of product, told Reuters in an interview.
"We actually want to take actions now. We actually want it to be able to complete the payment, to process the booking, to place the order," which goes beyond "rule-based automations" for legacy bots, she said.
Gleit is spearheading the company's efforts to expand into new lines of business around AI agents, including with a new team, Enterprise Solutions, announced as part of a recent companywide restructuring around AI.
Alongside offerings inside Meta's apps, the company is also rolling out a broader "Business Agent Platform" aimed at giving businesses the infrastructure to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere.
The platform is connected to a suite of hundreds of non-Meta systems like Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee, where those agents can be deployed, and provides larger businesses with enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and measurement, the company said.