Meta Is Targeting 'Hundreds of Millions' of Businesses In Agentic AI Deployment

Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the company's upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents for hundreds of millions of businesses. CNBC reports: The AI agents won't just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action -- surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that's where Shih comes in. Meta's AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses. 'Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we're building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that's happening,' she told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series.

She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide. 'We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses,' Shih said. While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, 'doing fancy things like fine tuning models,' as Shih put it, 'If you're a small business -- you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you're distributing through Instagram -- you don't have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won't have to.'

For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life. For consumers, Shih says, 'Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends.' On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. 'They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7.'

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