Meta’s Business AI Is Quietly Hitting 10 Million Conversations a Week

Meta doesn’t get talked about much when people list the top AI companies. That’s fair — they’re not OpenAI or Google in the public imagination. But the numbers coming out of their latest earnings call suggest they’re quietly building something real.

As of late March, Meta’s business AI tools were handling about 10 million conversations per week. That’s up from 1 million at the beginning of this year. Tenfold growth in three months is the kind of trajectory that makes you sit up and pay attention.

The company recently expanded the beta of its business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. So this isn’t a small test anymore — it’s a global rollout, even if it’s still in beta.

Here’s the interesting part: Meta isn’t charging for this yet. They’re giving it away to small businesses to get scale. Zuckerberg was pretty direct about it on the call: “Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model.”

Translation: enjoy it while it lasts. Once they’ve got enough businesses hooked, the pricing will come.

Under the hood, these tools are powered by Muse Spark, the first LLM to come out of Meta Superintelligence Labs — the division they set up last year. It’s their own model, not something bolted on from a third party.

The ad side is also showing traction. More than 8 million advertisers are using at least one of Meta’s GenAI ad creative tools now. Adoption is particularly strong among small and medium businesses, which makes sense — those are the ones who don’t have in-house design teams. CFO Susan Li mentioned that advertisers using the video generation feature saw conversion rates over 3% higher in tests. That’s not life-changing, but it’s a solid lift.

Meta is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week. This lets advertisers link their Meta ad account to an AI agent. I’m curious to see how that plays out — AI agents managing ad accounts is still early days, and the results have been mixed across the industry.

The broader business is doing fine. Revenue hit $56.3 billion for the quarter, up 33% year-over-year. Profit was $26.8 billion, compared to $16.6 billion a year ago. The apps segment — WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions — brought in $885 million.

On the consumer side, Meta started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription earlier this month. It gives you custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. Basically a cosmetic upgrade. I’m not sure how many people will pay for that, but it’s a low-effort way to test willingness to pay on WhatsApp.

Overall, Meta’s AI play is less flashy than what you see from the usual suspects, but 10 million conversations a week is real usage. The question is whether they can turn that into meaningful revenue without alienating the small businesses they’re courting right now.