Markets & Business
Zuckerberg predicts billions will have personal AI agents within five years
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors he expects billions of people to have a personal AI agent working on their behalf within five years, even as Meta's stock dropped nearly 10% on the back of this quarter's earnings.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call to lay out a five-year bet: that billions of people will have their own personal AI agents. “I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” he said, adding that he could see people leaning on these agents for finances, health, relationships, and household management. He also pointed to WhatsApp as central to that future, noting it is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.
Meta isn’t alone in this bet — Google has emphasized custom AI agents in its Search overhaul, and Anthropic’s Claude has seen subscriptions climb as engineers adopt the Claude Code assistant. But investors haven’t rewarded Meta’s spending the way they might reward its rivals: the company’s stock dropped almost 10% after this quarter’s earnings. Reality Labs, Meta’s AR/VR division, lost around $4.6 billion this quarter — roughly in line with its losses every quarter since 2021, for a running total of about $88 billion.
Meta’s AI spending is likely to climb further, a growing concern given the company’s free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down 91% year over year from $8.55 billion in the same quarter last year — a drop the company attributed to its AI infrastructure investments. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas. On compute strategy, Zuckerberg said, “We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there’s a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well.”
He described the personal agents Meta is building as “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead.” So far, the company’s business agents — rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter — have been adopted by more than one million businesses; consumer adoption may prove harder, but Meta is betting enterprise agents alone won’t get it to “billions.”
Why it matters
Zuckerberg is betting Meta’s next growth phase on personal AI agents becoming as ubiquitous as smartphones, even as investors weigh that bet against a steep drop in free cash flow and years of mounting Reality Labs losses.