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 these days. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic — they get all the headlines. But Meta’s quietly doing something interesting with AI in a space that actually makes money: business messaging.

During its Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, Meta said its business AI tools are now facilitating about 10 million conversations per week as of late March. That’s up from 1 million at the beginning of this year. Tenfold growth in three months is nothing to sneeze at, even for a company Meta’s size.

The jump comes after Meta expanded the beta of its business AI assistant across the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. They’re basically carpet-bombing the globe with this thing.

Here’s the kicker: Meta isn’t charging for it yet. These tools are free for small businesses, which is how you get scale fast. But Mark Zuckerberg pretty much told everyone on the call that this won’t last forever.

“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,” he said.

Translation: we’re hooking you now, we’ll figure out pricing later.

The underlying tech is Meta’s new large language model called Muse Spark. This is the first model released under Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division they set up last year. The name is grandiose, but the results so far seem solid.

Meta’s also seeing traction with its creative AI tools for advertisers. CFO Susan Li mentioned that more than 8 million advertisers are using at least one of their GenAI ad creative tools, with particularly strong adoption among small and medium businesses. The video generation feature is driving more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests. That’s not a massive lift, but in ad land, every percentage point matters.

This week they’re also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors, which lets advertisers link their Meta ad account to an AI agent. I’m curious to see how that plays out — connecting AI agents to ad accounts feels like something that could either be incredibly useful or a total headache depending on execution.

On the financial side, Meta’s apps pulled in $885 million in revenue for the quarter, mostly from WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions. They started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription this month that gives you custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. It’s a small thing, but it shows they’re still looking for ways to squeeze more revenue out of their user base.

The broader numbers are impressive: profit of $26.8 billion in Q1, up from $16.6 billion a year ago. Revenue hit $56.3 billion, up 33% year-over-year. Meta’s core business is doing just fine, which gives them room to experiment with AI tools without worrying about immediate returns.

I’ve seen a lot of AI companies struggle with the “how do we make money from this” question. Meta’s approach — give it away to businesses, let them get dependent on it, then flip the switch on monetization — is aggressive but it’s worked for them before with other products. The question is whether small businesses will stick around once the price tag appears.