Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will

What happened

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years.

6 billion this quarter, roughly in line with the losses the division has posted each quarter since 2021. That’s a running total now of around $88 billion. Meta’s AI spending is likely to climb even higher, which is more of a concern at this juncture. 55 billion the same quarter last year. That’s a 91% drop year over year, exacerbated by the company’s investments in AI infrastructure.

Why it matters

He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management. “As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.

Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf rather than just answer questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its Search overhaul, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google.

Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over the agentic coding assistant Claude Code. Compared to its competitors, however, Meta may not enjoy as much confidence from investors as it continues dumping cash into innovative projects that may or may not pan out — Meta’s stock dropped almost 10% after posting this quarter’s earnings.

What to watch

This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas. “We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there’s a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well,” Zuckerberg said.

” So far, Meta’s business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than one million businesses. It may be harder to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the road to “billions” has to start somewhere — the company can’t get there on enterprise agents alone. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.