Meta’s Business AI Is Quietly Hitting 10 Million Conversations a Week

Meta doesn’t get talked about much when people list the top AI players right now. But the numbers tell a different story.

On its Q1 earnings call Wednesday, Meta said its business AI tools are now facilitating about 10 million conversations per week as of late March. That’s up from 1 million at the start of the year. A 10x jump in three months is nothing to sneeze at, even for a company Meta’s size.

The growth coincides with Meta expanding the beta of its business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. They’ve been quietly rolling this out to more businesses, and it’s clearly working.

Here’s the kicker: Meta isn’t making a dime off these tools yet. They’re free for small businesses right now. CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged as much on the call, saying they’re focused on scale first but hinted at a monetization model coming down the pike. “Business AIs today are currently free for most businesses on our messaging apps, but as we make more progress, we expect that we will also work towards establishing a longer-term monetization model,” he said.

Translation: enjoy it while it lasts.

Meta has been weaving AI into its business product suite across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The underlying tech is powered by Muse Spark, the first LLM to come out of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division, which they set up last year. That name still feels a bit grandiose, but the results speak for themselves.

The creative AI tools are also seeing real traction. CFO Susan Li noted that more than 8 million advertisers are now using at least one of Meta’s GenAI ad creative tools, with particularly strong adoption among small and medium businesses. And it’s not just vanity metrics—advertisers using the video generation feature saw conversion rates improve by over 3% in tests. That’s a meaningful lift for something that probably took less effort than shooting a traditional ad.

Meta also announced the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week. It lets advertisers link their Meta ad account to an AI agent. I’m curious to see how this plays out—connecting AI agents to ad platforms has been tried before, but Meta’s reach could make it stick.

On the broader business side, Meta reported a profit of $26.8 billion for Q1, up from $16.6 billion a year ago. Revenue hit $56.3 billion, a 33% increase year-over-year. Zuckerberg also mentioned that the company’s apps generated $885 million in revenue for the quarter, mostly from WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions. They even started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription earlier this month that gives you custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. It’s a small thing, but it shows they’re still looking for ways to monetize beyond ads.

None of this is flashy. Meta isn’t launching a chatbot that writes poetry or generating viral videos. But 10 million business conversations a week is real scale. And when they eventually flip the switch on monetization, that’s going to be a very different story.