Meta Business Agent rolls out globally - an AI operator for customer chats
At its 5th Annual Conversations conference in London, Meta broadcast a keynote on June 3 with its biggest announcements. The headline: Meta Business Agent is now rolling out globally - an AI agent that lets businesses respond to customers 24/7 on WhatsApp, Messenger and now Instagram.
Setup takes minutes, the agent speaks customers' local languages, and it can answer FAQs, recommend products, book appointments, qualify leads and close sales.
Meta describes the new agent as having agentic capabilities - moving from basic chatbot to an operator that can autonomously:
Answer questions specific to your business
Make product recommendations from your catalog
Book calendar appointments and qualify incoming leads
Let you decide when a human team member steps in
Close sales transactions directly inside chat threads
Deliver morning briefings summarizing overnight customer interactions and trends
The agent learns over time. Meta's CEO says it will soon go further - suggesting ways to grow your business, offering competitive intelligence and real-time insight into what is working - and eventually, in his words, "help you run your whole business." (His ambitions come as Meta races to keep pace with agentic AI developments, with the unwinding of the Manus deal complicating the picture.)
Meta Business Agent was tested for two years in select markets including India and Mexico, and more than one million businesses already use it. Meta also announced new ways for people to find your business directly in WhatsApp search, and an enterprise-focused Meta Business Agent Platform that connects to systems like Shopify and Zendesk.
Getting started is free for now; Meta says paid subscriptions with options for businesses of every size will roll out in the coming months. Given Meta's long-standing trust deficits, a cautious approach is reasonable: explore the free tier, but keep control over what is sent to your clients and followers until independent success stories accumulate.
Separately, a tech news site reports Instagram is alerting users who were targeted by hackers during AI chatbot attacks. If you have noticed an uptick in junk DMs - particularly ones pretending to be Meta AI - be careful what you click.
