Meta Is Targeting 'Hundreds of Millions' of Businesses In Agentic AI Deployment 14
Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the company's upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents for hundreds of millions of businesses. CNBC reports: The AI agents won't just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action -- surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that's where Shih comes in. Meta's AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses. "Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we're building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that's happening," she told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series.
She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide. "We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses," Shih said. While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, "doing fancy things like fine tuning models," as Shih put it, "If you're a small business -- you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you're distributing through Instagram -- you don't have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won't have to."
For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life. For consumers, Shih says, "Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends." On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. "They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7."
She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide. "We're quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they're going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice -- the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses," Shih said. While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, "doing fancy things like fine tuning models," as Shih put it, "If you're a small business -- you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you're distributing through Instagram -- you don't have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won't have to."
For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life. For consumers, Shih says, "Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends." On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. "They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7."
Small businesses and coffee shops won't care (Score:4, Interesting)
Large companies will replace a lot of workers with the software. I wonder what the next step is after learn to code?
Re: (Score:3)
"They're using WhatsApp, they're using Facebook, they're using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships."
Facebook is an advertising company, and they're hoping small businesses will use AI to produce better spam (or marketing, whichever term you prefer).
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand I could see Yelp style shakedowns being automated and used to force businesses to cough up in order to maintain their online reputation. That's a possibility.
Re: (Score:2)
But they will continue to get run out of business by large conglomerates due to a lack of antitrust law enforcement and right-wing economic policies that favor big business over literally anything or anyone else.
I'm not sure if it's happening in the rest of the country, but here locally there's been a concerted effort to have "small business owners" singing the praises of AI. Now, none of them have anything specific that AI has actually helped them achieve, but all of these commercials are very, "We're looking forward to seeing how much AI can improve our business.
As a guy that mostly sees the current AI craze as a data-pooling effort, how much of this push into the smaller business world is about gathering info on
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends.
If that's the best AI can do, then it's not much better than Siri.
Will ClippyAI report to the mothership :o (Score:2)
"reasoning" (Score:4, Insightful)
The AI agents won't just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re: (Score:2)
It mean regurgitating text that looks like reasoning but is actually barely coherent gibberish... just like how real humans think!
Maybe they'll do this in the Metaverse (Score:5, Insightful)
Pure bollocks, as the Brits say. The basic idea, as best I could decipher after peeling away many layers of nonsense, is that instead of businesses just having Facebook pages somehow Facebook will make these into "agentic AI" that makes these business somehow more awesomer.
And I guess the business owners or workers will also somehow use WhatsApp or Instagram or Facebook to do ask AI to surf the web for them. "Hey WhatsApp, can you post content to my Instagram account that is not exactly the like content you made for all the other businesses that are like mine except in some other neighborhood and run by other people?" That definitely will not lead to an explosion of AI slop. Or maybe these business will finally truly see the future and use this agentic AI to run their business in the Metaverse.
My local coffee shop's or restaurant's Facebook page can all of a sudden can chat with me about varieties of coffee or post even more pictures on its Instagram feed and this interests me as a customer why?
The place still can only take order online if there is some sort of integration with their order system, which they either do or don't have regardless of Agentic AI. The data on the page will remain just as stale as it usually is with respect to hours, offerings, people, etc., unless the business spends more time updating the Facebook page than it does now - Agentic AI can only beg for more attention from the business owner.
This is a great example of a company solving its own problems rather than any customer's problems. A large business would almost certainly not want to entrust its external communications to some AI chatbot on its Facebook page, while an AI agent can't actually change that much about the business model or fundamentals for smaller businesses.
Re: Maybe they'll do this in the Metaverse (Score:2)
That certainly seems to be the theme for this age: Donâ(TM)t ask the users or customers what they want, just come up with things and shove it down their throats. If they donâ(TM)t like it? Well, the business is definitely smarter than the customer. We will TELL THEM what they like. Then monopoly and make it so that they donâ(TM)t ever have a choice at all.
It will be really interesting to see what the future holds as monopolies strangle the life out of business and people with terrible product