Meta introduces the “business agent” function: AIS provides services in WhatsApp and Instagram

In order to break the advertising restrictions and benefit from AI, Meta recently announced that the AI agent Meta Business Agent would provide services worldwide through WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram to respond to client advice, recommend products and appointments.

Meta BusinessAgent will be included in the business-oriented Meta One subscription package. Meta launched Meta One last week as a way to package high-level services to creators and companies. Meta also indicated at that time that it would begin testing subscription services for its Meta AI application and website.

Mark Zuckerberg said: “Today, I would like to introduce you to Meta Business Agent, who can provide an AI agent to any business to help it communicate with its clients and run its business. The same all-weather, highly personalized service experience is now available regardless of the size of the enterprise.”

Since Facebook began advertising users in 2007, Zuckerberg has operated a thriving online advertising company. Over the years, Meta has suffered repeated setbacks in sales figures and physical products, but advertising revenues still account for about 98 per cent of its total income. While AI helped the company consolidate its core business, Meta had greater ambitions in the area of artificial intelligence, and he was trying to compete with OpenAI and Google in developing cutting-edge models and selling services on that basis.

According to Zuckerberg, Meta is currently “building agency capabilities” that can perform high-level tasks, such as “advising development operations, providing competitive intelligence and real-time insights into what works and what does not”. In a pre-prepared statement, Zuckerberg said: “As our model advances, the client’s agent will take on more work, eventually helping the user to run the whole business.”

In October last year, Meta released a free-of-charge test version of the service, then known as Business AI, available only in a few countries, such as Mexico and India.

Meta is entering an increasingly competitive field. Amazon and Microsoft have recently released proxy tools, and AI users embrace the OpenClaw AI proxy platform, free of charge, described as “the most popular open-source project in the history of humankind” by the CEO Wong In-hoon. Large businesses that currently use the commercial platform Meta WhatsApp will pay for the new AI proxy function in terms of usage, similar to the way they pay for every message they send to customers on the application.

Clients can also access a new Meta Business Agent Platform, which allows them to connect to third-party data sources from services such as Shopify and Zendesk, thus providing “personalized experience in client-used news applications”, indicated by Meta.