Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell his predictions for the future to investors. In the future, billions of people will have their own personal AI agents within the next five years. (Hopefully, the future will provide data centers efficient enough to power all the agents without causing a new wave of climate disasters.)
“If you look ahead, for example, five years from now, whatever time period you want, I think it’s very unlikely that there won’t be billions of people who understand your goals and have a personal agent working on your behalf 24/7,” Zuckerberg said during a quarterly earnings call with investors Wednesday.
He added that people can be seen using these agents to help manage their finances, health, relationships and household chores.
“I think WhatsApp and other messaging surfaces will become increasingly important as we move toward a future where we all interact with multiple agents,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already a leading platform for users to interact with Meta AI.
Meta isn’t alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on behalf of humans, rather than simply answering questions. Google has highlighted custom AI agents as a key new feature in its search overhaul, which has sparked protests from users who feel bogged down by the constant barrage of AI results from Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude soared as engineers fawned over its agent coding assistant, Claude Code.
However, compared to its competitors, Meta may not have as much confidence from investors as it continues to pour cash into innovative projects that may or may not succeed. Shares of Meta fell nearly 10% after posting earnings for the current quarter. Meta’s Reality Labs, an organization responsible for AR glasses, VR headsets and related software, lost about $4.6 billion this quarter. That’s roughly on par with the losses the department has posted in each quarter since 2021. The current cumulative total is approximately $88 billion.
Meta’s AI spending is likely to increase further, which is of greater concern at this point. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million for the quarter, down from $8.55 billion in the same quarter last year. This represents a 91% year-on-year decline, exacerbated by the company’s investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.
“We believe there will continue to be much higher margins if you sell intelligence than if you sell computing directly, but we certainly think there is a huge opportunity to sell computing as well,” Zuckerberg said.
Ultimately, he believes the personal agents Meta is developing will become “the foundation for the next generation of products and revenue lines in the coming months and years.”
So far, Meta’s Business Agent, which launched globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, has been adopted by over 1 million businesses. Getting people to adopt consumer AI agents may be more difficult, but the road to “billions” has to start somewhere. Companies can’t get there with enterprise agents alone.
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