Thought Leadership
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects that in five years, billions of people will use their own personal AI agent.
On Wednesday’s earnings call for the quarterly results, Zuckerberg said it was “extremely unlikely” that in about five years there would not be billions of people with a personal agent that understands their goals and works on their behalf around the clock to achieve them, regardless of the area of life involved. He named finance, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management as possible areas of use. WhatsApp and Meta’s other messaging services would become increasingly important in this context, he said, since interaction with multiple agents would increase. WhatsApp is already the leading platform through which people interact with Meta AI, he added.
Other major technology companies are also increasingly focusing on capable AI agents rather than pure question-and-answer systems. As part of a search overhaul, Google had highlighted its own AI agents as a key new feature. At Anthropic, meanwhile, the number of paying individual subscribers to Claude has reportedly risen significantly, while the agentic coding assistant Claude Code in particular is gaining traction among developers.
Meta’s stock falls despite the announcement
Unlike some competitors, investors reacted cautiously to Meta’s own figures: the stock lost almost 10 percent at one point after the quarterly report was presented. Meta’s Reality Labs division, responsible for AR glasses, VR headsets, and related software, posted a loss of around 4.6 billion US dollars for the quarter, roughly in line with the losses the division has posted every quarter since 2021. Reality Labs has now accumulated a total loss of around 88 billion US dollars.
The company’s free cash flow fell to 784 million US dollars for the quarter, compared with 8.55 billion US dollars in the same quarter last year, a decline of 91 percent, which Meta attributes in part to its own investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and asset manager BlackRock also announced a partnership to build a 14 billion US dollar data center in El Paso, Texas.
Zuckerberg said the company continues to expect significantly higher margins from selling intelligence than from selling computing power directly, but also sees a major opportunity in selling computing capacity directly. In his words, the personal agents Meta is developing are meant to form “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines” in the months and years ahead. Meta’s business agents, already rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger, have so far been adopted by more than one million businesses, according to the company.
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