Meta says its business AI now supports 10 million conversations a week

Meta doesn’t come up much in discussions of high-end AI products these days, but its products are still benefiting from an increasing amount of interest in the technology. The company’s AI tools supported about 10 million conversations per week at the end of March, up from 1 million earlier this year, Meta said at its first-quarter conference call on Wednesday.

Growth comes as a company soon extended the beta program of its AI assistant in the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM.

Meta doesn’t monetize its business AI tools, giving them away for free to small businesses to help them grow, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted that could change soon.

“Business AI is currently free for most businesses in our messaging apps, but as we move forward, we expect to also work to establish a long-term revenue model,” Zuckerberg said at the time.

Meta has been building AI capabilities into its suite of business products across its various platforms, and is working to leverage these features with its new core language, Muse Sparkthe first to be released under the Meta Superintelligence Labs division established last year.

The company said it saw strong growth in its AI production tools in the quarter. “The use of our ad generation tools is increasing, with more than 8 million marketers using one of our GenAI ad generation tools, and strong adoption among small and medium-sized businesses. These tools are also benefiting from performance, with marketers using our video generation feature seeing higher conversion rates of over 3% in trials,” CFO Susan Li said on the call.

The company is also launching an open beta of Meta Ads AI Connectors this week, which will allow advertisers to connect their Meta Ads account to an AI assistant.

Zuckerberg also said that the company’s apps generated $885 million in revenue in the quarter, mainly due to the demand for paid messages on WhatsApp and subscriptions to its apps. Earlier this month, the company began testing WhatsApp Plus subscription which gives users access to images, titles, and text information.

The company reported a profit of $26.8 billion in the first quarter, up from $16.6 billion a year earlier. The revenue came in at $56.3 billion, up 33% from last year.