Meta’s Business AI Is Quietly Hitting 10 Million Conversations a Week

Meta doesn’t get the same hype as OpenAI or Google when people talk about AI, but the numbers tell a different story. During its Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, the company revealed that its business AI tools now facilitate about 10 million conversations per week as of late March. That’s up from 1 million at the start of the year, which is a pretty steep growth curve by any measure.

This jump coincides with Meta expanding the beta program for its business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. They’re not charging for it yet, offering it free to small businesses to get scale, but that’s probably not going to 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,” Mark Zuckerberg said during the call. That’s the kind of careful phrasing you use when you want to signal a future paid tier without spooking current users.

Under the hood, Meta is powering these tools with Muse Spark, its new large language model and the first to come out of the Meta Superintelligence Labs division it set up last year. The company has been quietly baking AI into its suite of business products across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and it’s starting to show.

Creative AI tools are also gaining traction. CFO Susan Li noted that more than 8 million advertisers are now using at least one of Meta’s GenAI ad creative tools, with particularly strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. The performance numbers look solid too: advertisers using the video generation feature saw more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests. Not earth-shattering, but meaningful at Meta’s scale.

This week, Meta is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors, which lets advertisers link their Meta ad account to an AI agent. That feels like a natural next step given how much of the ad ecosystem already relies on automation.

On the broader business side, Meta’s apps generated $885 million in revenue for the quarter, mostly from paid messaging on WhatsApp and app subscriptions. Earlier this month, the company started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that gives you custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. It’s a small thing, but it shows they’re thinking about more ways to extract revenue from their massive user base.

The financials are strong overall: profit hit $26.8 billion in Q1, up from $16.6 billion a year ago, on revenue of $56.3 billion, a 33% increase year-over-year. Meta is printing money, and AI is becoming a bigger part of that story, even if it’s not the headline grabber some other companies are.