Meta doesn’t come up much in discussions of the top AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from the ongoing surge of interest in the technology. The company’s business AI tools facilitated about 10 million conversations per week as of late March, up from 1 million in the beginning of this year, Meta said during its first-quarter conference call on Wednesday.
The growth comes as the company recently expanded the beta program of its business AI assistant in the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM.
Meta isn’t monetizing its business AI tools yet, offering them for free to small businesses to achieve scale, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that may change in the near future.
“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,” Zuckerberg said during the call.
Meta has been baking AI capabilities into its suite of business products on its various platforms, and is working to power these products with its new large language model, Muse Spark, the first one to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division set up last year.
The company said it has seen solid traction for its creative AI tools in the quarter. “Usage of our ad creative tools is also scaling, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, and particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are benefiting performance as well, with advertisers using our video generation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests,” CFO Susan Li said on the call.
The company is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will let advertisers connect their Meta ad account to an AI agent.
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Zuckerberg noted that the company’s apps altogether generated revenue of $885 million in the quarter, largely due to demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its apps. Earlier this month, the company started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds.
The company reported profit of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion a year earlier. Revenue came in at $56.3 billion, up 33% from last year.
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