Meta enters enterprise AI with business agents for daily operations

Meta unveiled AI-powered 'business agents' designed to help companies run day-to-day operations, expanding its existing business-messaging services with agentic capabilities. Announced at its WhatsApp-focused Conversations conference, the agents can book appointments, close sales and automate routine customer interactions — Meta's clearest move into enterprise AI to date.

The foundation is Meta's open-source Llama infrastructure, which the company pitches as enabling customizable, privacy-focused automation for corporate workflows. The distribution angle is what makes Meta distinctive: WhatsApp and Messenger already host enormous volumes of business-to-customer conversation, especially outside the US, giving Meta a built-in channel that pure-play enterprise vendors lack.

The move plants Meta directly against Microsoft's Work IQ/Agent 365, OpenAI's business plugins and Google's Gemini agents — all racing to own the 'agent that runs your business' category. Meta's bet is that conversational commerce over its messaging apps is the natural home for these agents, rather than a separate enterprise console.

The skeptical read is execution: Meta has repeatedly announced business-messaging ambitions, and 'agentic' booking and sales features will be judged on reliability and merchant adoption, not the demo. Pricing and the trust model for letting an agent transact on a business's behalf are the details to watch.