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ZDNET's key takeaways
Meta's new Business AI agent is free to use on Meta Ads.
It can provide basic online customer and sales support for businesses.
The company also launched new AI tools for advertisers.
Meta is continuing to build AI for advertisers. Its latest AI agent and several new tools are designed to serve as an automated online sales assistant and personalization feature for small- to medium-sized businesses, even outside of Facebook and other Meta platforms.
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At the same time, the company will start using your chats with Meta AI to personalize the ads you see on Meta platforms.
Business Agent
The company's new Business AI agent can provide online shoppers with basic customer support and product recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The goal is to quicken the process between customers discovering a new product and completing a purchase, while simultaneously freeing businesses up to focus their attention on more pressing tasks.
Leading tech companies have been investing heavily in business-facing AI agents, promoting them as a simple and effective way to automate busywork. Like many other agents, Business AI specializes in analyzing and integrating with the context of the business deploying it; the system automatically assesses a brand's preexisting online presence to modify its outputs.
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Eligible businesses can now access Meta's new agent for free via Meta Ads. It's also available "at a fraction of the cost of other solutions," Meta wrote in a company blog post, for businesses based in the US that want to add it to their website, or to their WhatsApp and Messenger accounts, with availability in more countries expected soon. (A company spokesperson declined to provide additional details around the agent's pricing structure.)
Your AI chats will influence the ads you see
Alongside this product release, Meta had some news about its user experience and personalization policy. Starting Dec. 16, the company will begin using individual users' interactions with its Meta AI chatbot to customize the ads and content recommendations they see on Facebook and Instagram, the company announced Wednesday. Someone asking one of Meta's chatbots about local dining options, for example, might start seeing ads for nearby restaurants on Meta platforms.
There's no opt-out option for the new personalization changes, Meta said in its announcement. You always have the option of not interacting with the company's chatbots while using its apps, of course, but the company is also reportedly working on chatbots that proactively strike up a conversation with users.
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Some conversation topics won't be included as training data, including anything that covers sexual orientation, health, race, religion, or political views. Chats that take place before Dec. 16 also won't be used, and the personalization changes will not initially apply to users in the UK, South Korea, or the European Union, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to ZDNET.
While Meta said it won't start using chat data for targeting ads until Dec. 16, it's hard not to see a relationship between the company's increased in-house personalization via AI and the launch of external AI personalization tools for businesses. It's unclear what the relationship will be between user chat data and the models powering external tools for advertisers.
More AI tools for advertisers
Meta also announced Thursday that it was launching more AI tools to help businesses create ads on Advantage+, its AI-powered social media ad campaign management platform. There's a new AI-generated music feature, for example, which, according to Meta, "understands the content of an ad and produces unique, custom music that reflects the product, style, and sentiment -- helping brands better engage their audiences and connect in new ways."
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The company also introduced AI dubbing for quick translation to reach international audiences, a tool for generating higher-quality AI-generated videos in ads, and another that generates a set of images curated to different audience demographics.
The new features build on a broader offering of generative AI tools for advertisers, which Meta first began rolling out in October 2023, during the company's so-called "Year of Efficiency," which centered on -- among other initiatives -- internal layoffs and a shift in focus toward AI.
A broader goal
While Meta pushes new AI tools to businesses to help them sell products, the company is also working towards automating the entirety of the advertising production process, from ideation to campaign launch -- although it isn't totally clear at this point what such comprehensive automation might look like in practice.
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Similarly, Amazon unveiled an agent last month that can assist with every step of creating a short video ad, including the generation of custom voiceovers.