Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations per week

Meta doesn’t come up as much in discussions of the best AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from a continued surge of interest in the technology. Meta said on Wednesday’s first-quarter conference call that the company’s business artificial intelligence tools have enabled about 10 million conversations a week since the end of March, up from 1 million earlier this year.

Growth comes as a company of late the business has expanded the beta program of its AI assistant In the US, EMEA, APAC and LATAM.

Meta doesn’t yet monetize its business AI tools, offering them for free to small businesses to gain scale, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that could change in the near future.

“Today, business AI in our messaging apps is free for most businesses, but as we make more progress, we expect to work toward building a long-term monetization model,” Zuckerberg said on the call.

Meta is expanding its AI capabilities across its suite of business products across its various platforms, and is working to power those products with a new major language model. Muse Sparkthe first to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division established last year.

The company said it saw solid traction for its creative AI tools in the quarter. “Usage of our ad creative tools is also expanding, with more than 8 million advertisers using at least one of our GenAI ad creative tools, and adoption is particularly strong among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools also benefit performance, with advertisers using our video creation feature seeing more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests,” said CFO Susan Lee on the call.

The company is also launching an open beta version of its Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will allow advertisers to connect their Meta ad accounts to an AI agent.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s apps generated a total of $885 million in revenue in the quarter, largely due to demand for paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its apps. Earlier this month, the company began testing WhatsApp Plus subscription gives users access to custom icons, themes, and notification sounds.

The company reported first-quarter profits of $26.8 billion, up from $16.6 billion a year earlier. Revenue increased by 33% compared to last year and was 56.3 billion dollars.