STOCKS | Meta’s Enterprise AI Push Faces Website Resistance, Gains Ground on WhatsApp

Meta is building an enterprise sales business for AI products, recruiting a team to sell to small and midsize businesses and partnering with Accenture, Deloitte and IBM to promote and deploy its tools. According to Sina Finance, the initiative aims to turn Meta’s AI investment, including up to $145 billion in planned capital spending this year, into a new revenue stream. In September, CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta Enterprise Platform to sell AI products to businesses and developers, including Muse Code, enterprise agent software and the Muse Spark model series. He appointed former MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai to lead the division and called it a potential major pillar for Meta. Meta’s Workplace product had 7 million paid users at its 2021 peak, but struggled to compete with Microsoft and Slack; Meta announced its closure in 2024. The company also scaled back or adjusted enterprise virtual reality products. Meta tried to persuade retailers to put AI agents on their websites last October, but major companies including Amazon and Booking.com resisted. They cited concerns about Meta accessing their customers, control over agent responses and handoffs to human customer service, and sharing customer data. Integrating agents with back-end inventory, pricing and logistics systems also proved more complex than Meta expected. Meta halted the website deployment project last December after customer feedback indicated that consumers did not want to interact with chatbots on retail sites. Meta has had more success deploying agents on its own messaging platforms. Brazilian car rental company Movida uses one on WhatsApp, while Indian e-commerce company Flipkart and Brazilian electronic toll-service provider Sem Parar have also adopted the product. Meta product vice president Fred Leach said the company is working to bring more large businesses to its messaging apps and that it is “just getting started.” On its recent third-quarter earnings call, Meta said more enterprise products are forthcoming. Zuckerberg said its long-term goal is to build an AI-agent “business network” that can operate across companies.