Mark Zuckerberg wants to run your business. Or rather, he wants his algorithms to do it. At a London conference on Wednesday, Meta unveiled its latest play for corporate dominance: an AI “business agent” designed to handle the daily grind. It is not just another chatbot. This one actually does things.
Think booking appointments. Think closing sales. Meta claims over a million businesses already use its basic bots on WhatsApp and Messenger. Now, Instagram gets the upgrade too. It is a global rollout. No business is too small, or too desperate, to opt in.
This is a direct shot at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Meta has a massive advantage: billions of users already trapped in its ecosystem. The new agent mimics a company’s specific voice. It answers FAQs, screens leads, and hands off the messiest problems to actual humans. For now, anyway.
It is free. At least, for now. Meta plans to squeeze businesses for subscription fees later. “This is definitely an enterprise play,” Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, told Reuters. She wants action. No more simple, rule-based bots. Gleit wants these digital workers processing payments and taking orders. She is leading a newly minted “Enterprise Solutions” team, born from Meta’s recent internal reshuffling.
But Meta isn’t stopping inside its own walled gardens. They are launching a “Business Agent Platform” too. This lets companies build custom bots to deploy on external systems like Shopify, Zendesk, and Shopee. It comes with the usual corporate promises of guardrails and control. We will see how long that lasts.
