Meta’s business AI is quietly hitting 10 million conversations a week

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

On its Q1 earnings call Wednesday, Meta 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. Tenfold growth in roughly three months is nothing to sneeze at.

The jump coincides with Meta expanding the beta of its business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. The company is giving these tools away for free to small businesses, aiming for scale before profit.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that won’t last forever. “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 during the call.

That’s typical Meta playbook: build a massive user base first, figure out the money later. It worked for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Whether it works for AI assistants remains to be seen, but the early traction is hard to ignore.

Meta has been quietly baking AI into its suite of business products across platforms. The brains behind all this is Muse Spark, the first large language model from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division, which was set up last year.

The company also reported solid numbers for its creative AI tools. CFO Susan Li shared 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. Advertisers using the video generation feature saw more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests. That’s a meaningful bump.

This week, Meta is also launching the open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors, which lets advertisers link their Meta ad account to an AI agent. I’m curious to see how that plays out — connecting ad accounts to third-party AI agents could get messy fast, but the potential for automation is real.

On the financial side, Meta reported profit of $26.8 billion in Q1, up from $16.6 billion a year ago. Revenue hit $56.3 billion, a 33% year-over-year increase. The apps segment alone brought in $885 million, driven largely by paid messaging on WhatsApp and subscriptions. Earlier this month, Meta started testing a WhatsApp Plus subscription with custom icons, themes, and notification sounds.

It’s still early days for Meta’s AI push, and the company hasn’t proven it can turn these tools into a real revenue stream yet. But 10 million conversations a week is a solid foundation to build on.