Meta rolls out AI-powered 'business agents' to challenge tech giants including Microsoft, OpenAI

Meta enters the enterprise AI race with a new business agent to challenge big tech giants like OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot amid the new artificial intelligence (AI) competitive race.

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.

Leveraging its open-source Llama infrastructure, Mark Zuckerberg's tech giant takes direct aim at corporate workflows by offering companies customizable, privacy-focused automation."

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 on businesses' ‌behalf, like booking calendar appointments and closing sales.

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 social media apps to try to convince companies to consolidate their ads and other workflows.

"This is definitely an enterprise play," Naomi Gleit, Meta's head of product, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.

Meta 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 business agents 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.

Alongside the new Business Agent offerings inside Meta's apps, the company is also launching a broader "Business Agent Platform" aimed at giving businesses tools to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere.

Meta is spearheading the company's efforts to expand into new ‌lines of ⁠business around AI agents, including enterprise solutions, announced as part of a recent companywide restructuring around AI.

Notably, Meta shares rose more than 3% in morning trading soon after the news unveiled.