Meta's business AI tools handled roughly 10 million conversations per week by late March, up from 1 million at the start of 2026, the company said on its Q1 earnings call. The tenfold jump came as Meta expanded the beta of its business AI assistant across the U.S., EMEA, APAC, and LATAM. The tools are still free, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the call to flag a paid tier on the way.
The growth lands inside a quarter where Meta booked $56.3 billion in revenue, up 33% from a year earlier, and $26.8 billion in profit, up from $16.6 billion. More than 8 million advertisers used at least one of Meta's GenAI ad creative tools during the period, with the company calling out small and medium businesses as the strongest adopters. CFO Susan Li said advertisers running the video generation feature saw more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests.
Meta's pitch to merchants is straightforward: drop a business AI agent into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, or Threads chats and let it handle customer questions, product lookups, and order flows. The 10-million-conversations figure is a usage number, not a revenue number, and Meta has been deliberate about keeping the tools free to chase scale before turning on the meter.
Key facts
- 01Meta business AI tools facilitated about 10 million conversations per week by late March, up from 1 million at the start of 2026.
- 02More than 8 million advertisers used at least one of Meta's GenAI ad creative tools in Q1.
- 03Advertisers using Meta's video generation feature saw more than 3% higher conversion rates in tests.
- 04Meta posted $56.3B in Q1 revenue, up 33% year over year, and $26.8B in profit versus $16.6B a year earlier.
- 05WhatsApp and app subscriptions generated $885M in the quarter, with a new WhatsApp Plus tier in testing.
"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 on the call. He did not give a timeline. The phrasing tracks with how Meta has historically rolled out paid layers on top of free distribution — Reels, Shops, and click-to-message ads all followed similar patterns.
“Meta's business AI tools handled roughly 10 million conversations per week by late March, up from 1 million at the start of the year — a tenfold jump in a single quarter.”— Jaeden Schafer
The assistants are increasingly powered by Muse Spark, the first model released by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division Meta stood up last year. Muse Spark is also the engine behind the GenAI ad creative tools that 8 million advertisers are now touching. Meta is also opening the beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which lets advertisers wire their ad accounts directly into an AI agent.
On the consumer side, Meta said its apps generated $885 million in revenue in the quarter, driven by paid messaging on WhatsApp and app subscriptions. The company began testing WhatsApp Plus earlier this month, a subscription that bundles custom icons, themes, and notification sounds. It is the clearest sign yet that Meta intends to charge inside its messaging surfaces, not just around them.
Li framed the GenAI ad creative numbers as a performance story, not a novelty one. A 3% lift in conversion rates is the kind of figure that compounds quickly across Meta's ad business, especially among the long tail of SMB advertisers who do not have in-house creative teams. That cohort is also the most plausible buyer for a future paid business AI tier.
The flip side is cost. Meta's broader AI buildout has been expensive — capex tied to AI infrastructure has climbed past $125 billion, and Reality Labs lost roughly $4 billion in the same quarter, as we covered earlier this week. The 10-million-conversation milestone is impressive in isolation, but it sits on top of a cost base that needs the eventual monetization Zuckerberg is hinting at.
There are also unknowns about quality and trust. Meta has not disclosed deflection rates, accuracy benchmarks, or how often a business AI conversation ends in a sale rather than a frustrated handoff to a human. "Conversations" is a usage metric, not an outcome metric, and the gap between the two is where most enterprise chatbot deployments have historically struggled.
Still, the trajectory matters. Meta has spent two years being treated as the also-ran in the consumer AI conversation while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google soaked up attention. A 10x jump in weekly business AI usage in one quarter — alongside 8 million advertisers using its creative tools — suggests Meta's distribution advantage on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook is doing exactly what Zuckerberg has insisted it would. The interesting question is no longer whether Meta can get scale on AI features. It is what the price tag looks like when the free period ends.
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