Meta’s Business AI Is Quietly Crushing It: 10 Million Conversations Per Week

Meta doesn’t get the same AI buzz as OpenAI or Google these days, but the numbers tell a different story. During its Q1 earnings call on Wednesday, the company revealed that 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 beginning of this year.

That’s a 10x jump in roughly three months. Not bad for a company that most people associate with social media drama rather than cutting-edge AI.

The growth coincides with Meta expanding the beta of its business AI assistant across the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. They’re casting a wide net, and it seems to be working.

Here’s the kicker: Meta isn’t making a dime from these tools yet. They’re free for small businesses, presumably to build scale and dependency. But Mark Zuckerberg dropped a hint during the call that this honeymoon phase might end soon.

“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,” Zuckerberg said.

Translation: get comfortable now, because eventually you’ll pay.

Under the hood, Meta is powering these products with Muse Spark, its new large language model and the first release from the Meta Superintelligence Labs division that was set up last year. It’s still early days for that lab, but this is a solid proof of concept.

The company’s 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-sized businesses. And it’s not just vanity metrics — advertisers using the video generation feature saw more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests. That’s the kind of number that actually matters.

This week, Meta is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors, which lets advertisers hook their Meta ad account directly to an AI agent. I’m curious to see how that plays out — connecting ad platforms to AI agents has been tried before, but Meta’s scale could make it genuinely useful.

On the broader business side, Meta’s apps generated $885 million in revenue for the quarter, mostly from paid messaging on WhatsApp and app subscriptions. They recently started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription that adds custom icons, themes, and notification sounds — a classic Meta move of monetizing vanity features.

Overall, the company reported a profit of $26.8 billion in Q1, up from $16.6 billion a year ago, on revenue of $56.3 billion — a 33% year-over-year increase. The core business is healthy, and the AI investments are starting to show real returns, even if they’re not directly monetized yet.

I’ve been skeptical about Meta’s AI ambitions in the past, especially given their track record with product launches. But 10 million conversations a week is hard to ignore. If they can figure out a monetization model that doesn’t alienate the small businesses they’re currently courting, this could become a serious revenue driver.

For now, though, they’re playing the long game — build the user base, refine the product, and turn on the pricing taps later. It’s a strategy that’s worked for them before.