Meta wants to give small businesses an AI boost with a customer support agent for Instagram and Facebook

Soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user—at a conference Tuesday morning.

“We are at an amazing and historic moment,” said Clara Shih, the VP of Business AI at Meta. “We are on the cusp of AI being in the hands of every consumer and every business.”

Over 600 million conversations between a person and a business occur in a day on all of Meta’s social platforms. With its new pilot program, Meta hopes to utilize its Llama AI model to help entrepreneurs and small business owners scale their businesses.

As soon as today, Meta users may begin to see business AI featured on ads from brands. Users can ask questions live on the ad page, and the AI agent will answer using data from the business’s Meta footprint (analyzing previous posts and customer service messages). Business owners can also input their own data sources.

Businesses can design these agents, which can operate both straight off of ads and also through DMs or Messenger, at no cost right now as the pilot program kicks off. Meta is currently working on specifics for pricing in the future.

Business owners can also delegate which tasks they want the AI agent to handle, and which tasks they want the AI to hand off to a live customer service representative. Tasks that the business AI can tackle include managing returns and exchanges, providing product recommendations, handling purchases, and similar services.

Shih said that providing these tools to all businesses, regardless of size, is “democratizing access” to powerful technology, which mainly large businesses have previously been able to implement.

“Fortune 500 companies have huge IT departments and can afford to piece together everything to make AI work . . . they’re fine tuning their models,” Shih said. “But if you’re a small business or even if you’re a medium-sized business, you don’t even know what fine tuning means. You shouldn’t have to.”

These upcoming AI agents are different from the typical pre-programmed chatbots that users may encounter: The text sounds more natural, they are embedded into Meta’s social media services, and they are often easier to set up.

In a January earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he expects 2025 to “be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”

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