Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s second-quarter earnings call to lay out sweeping AI ambitions spanning enterprise services, personal assistants, and faster app development, even as investors sent Meta’s stock down nearly 10% following the results.
Zuckerberg said Meta sees a large enterprise opportunity beyond the business AI agent it launched in June, including APIs, business agents, and potentially selling compute directly to large customers, describing the effort as an extension of Meta’s existing advertiser relationships where the company gets paid based on results delivered. He acknowledged that serving enterprise customers requires a different skill set than Meta has historically used, but said tools built internally for coding and productivity could eventually serve outside businesses too.
On compute, Zuckerberg said Meta could sell capacity at a premium over cost but called it unwise to sell everything off for short-term profit, describing a portfolio approach balancing near-term revenue against future infrastructure needs as the company moves toward more advanced AI systems.
Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that billions of people will have personal AI agents managing goals across finance, health, and household tasks within five years, with WhatsApp positioned as a central interface. Meta’s business agents have already been adopted by more than one million businesses since rolling out on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter.
In addition to this, Meta CFO Susan Li said large language models are increasingly driving recommendation and ranking improvements across Meta’s apps, including automatic topic analysis of every Instagram Reel and Feed post, and are helping engineers evaluate content quality and test ranking changes.
The AI investment comes alongside mounting costs: Reality Labs lost roughly $4.6 billion this quarter, free cash flow fell 91% year-over-year to $784 million, and Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion data center partnership in El Paso, Texas.
