Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people may have their own personal AI agents in the next 5 years. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient sufficient to power all those agents — without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.)
“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out out 5-years from now, for example— whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your aims and this is just working on your behalf 24/7 to obtain your goals in regardless of the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg stated on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.
He added that he should see people using agents to assist them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.
“As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with numerous agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly vital,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform wherein users interact with Meta AI.
Meta isn’t alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf in instead of simply answer questions. Google highlighted custom AI agents as a main new function in its Search overhaul, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down via the steady onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over the agentic coding assistant Claude Code.
Compared to its competition, moreover, Meta won’t enjoy as much confidence from investors as it persists dumping cash into progressive ventures which can or might not pan out — Meta’s stock dropped around 10% after posting this quarter’s earnings. Meta’s Reality Labs, the organization responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets, and associated software, lost around $4.6 billion this quarter, around in line with the losses the division has posted each quarter since 2021. That’s a running total now of around $88 billion.
Meta’s AI spending is probable to increase even higher, that is more of a concern at this juncture. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion the same quarter last year. That’s a 91% drop year over year, exacerbated by the company’s investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock declared a partnership to construct a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.
“We believe that there’ll persist to be a considerably higher margin on selling intelligence instead of selling compute directly, however we assume that there’s a huge opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well,” Zuckerberg stated.
Ultimately, he believes that the personal agents that Meta is developing will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead.”
So far, Meta’s business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than one million businesses. It may be difficult to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the road to “billions” has to begin somewhere — the company can’t get there on enterprise agents alone.
