Build on every platform with Meta

Hi, London. This is our fifth annual Conversations Conference and our first time hosting in this incredible city. For businesses, there is a transformation happening in how we engage with our customers. It wasn't a long time ago that every business needed a physical store and after the internet, every business needed a website and today, every business needs messaging.

This is true if you're a retailer with ten employees or an airline with a hundred thousand. Messaging has become the best way to engage customers where they already are. There are over 1 billion conversations between people and businesses every day on our messaging app. WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram direct.

This includes your first-time shopper messaging a local boutique to a customer resolving a claim in minutes instead of days. For hundreds of millions of businesses around the world, messaging is the storefront, the website, the sales floor, the support desk, the entire customer relationship. But for every messaging success story like all of the WhatsApp first businesses there are also real pain points. First messages go unread or get delayed responses.

Second, skilling is hard. Growing comes with increasing overhead costs and other challenges and the bigger you grow, the harder it is to maintain quality and consistency. Third, bots feel like bot robotic and impersonal chatbots will answer but they won't build the loyal relationships your brand depends on. Storefronts let you reach customers in your neighborhood.

Websites let you reach customers at scale. Messaging lets you build customer relationships at scale but there's a ceiling on what any team can handle. AI breaks through that ceiling. Agents allow you to always respond instantly with the personal connection of a face-to-face conversation.

In fact, nearly 70% of online adults agree that getting a response from AI is helpful and we're seeing how messaging is the natural way for people to experience AI. That's the shift. Welcome to the age of AI powered conversation. To Today, we are excited to show you new AI experiences that will take your messaging strategy to the next level because we hear the same things from businesses everywhere from the local shop to the Fortune 500 brand.

You're managing more messages than ever. You want to turn conversations into sales. You need to keep things operating smoothly behind the scenes and you want to scale with out losing the personal touch that makes your brand, your brand. This is what our AI messaging solution is built for.

Our agents are where your customers are and in the apps, that is 3. 5 billion people using them every day and our agent will go beyond just representing you in your conversations with customers. It will also be your business partner helping you behind the scenes, helping you run your business more efficiently and suggesting new ways to grow and we've built it so you can get started fast whether that means just a few clicks or plugging into your existing systems. From the beginning, our mission at Meta has been helping people and businesses connect.

We are turning those connections into results and now, we're about to do for AI what we did for digital advertising. Take something only the biggest companies could afford and put it in the hands of every business out there. To show you what we're building is someone who's been pushing us to build the future from the start. Alright, Hello, London.

I'm excited that we're hosting conversations in the UK for the first time. It's year five and it keeps getting bigger. Since I spoke to you last year, we have seen a major AI acceleration. Models are advancing faster and super intelligence is now in sight.

We've built the Meta Super Intelligence Lab and just launched Musepark powering better products for our businesses and in our community. A couple of years ago, I said that every business would have an AI agent just like you all have an Email address, a website, and the social media account and that's faster than I expected. Today, I want to introduce Meta Business Agent giving every business of any size and agent to talk to customers and help run your operation. So now, clothing shop in Birmingham or a bakery in Sao Paulo can offer the same always on highly personalized experience as a major brand.

More than a million businesses already use our agents on WhatsApp and Messenger and we're excited to expand to more countries and bring them to Instagram as well. The cool about having an AI agent that talks to your customers everyday is that it learns over time and it can bring all of that context back to you we're building agent capabilities that summarize threads digest what came in overnight and surface what your customers are asking for and soon it will go further suggesting ways to grow your business giving you competitive intelligence and real time insights into what's working and what's not. As our models advance your agent will take on more and eventually help you run your whole business. We want of every size to have access to this.

So for large enterprises that need more control, we are also launching the meta business agent platform. You plug in your existing systems, you set the rules, and your agent can handle everything from the first question to the final sale all inside our apps. We are also rolling out new discovery features in WhatsApp for the businesses that use our agents. Helping the three billion people using the app find and message you.

In the years ahead, I think that we're going to see a massive increase in entrepreneurship. AI will make it possible for people to create what they want to see in the world and deliver it at scale. That's where we're headed and I think it's really exciting. There's a lot more coming and the team will take you through all of it today.

So now, back to you, Naomi. These are really great solutions that we are excited to bring to all of your businesses. They're going to create this really powerful loop. You show up where people are already spending their time.

Met a business agent helps you handle the conversation at scale and on brand with the knowledge of both of the customer and business side of the conversation. So, it's not starting from zero and you turn that into real results. Sales bookings, support without a massive infrastructure investment. Mark just showed you where we're headed and now, to show you what it can do for your business today, here's Fred.

I bet noone in this room has as much time as they want. I'm going to tell you about a solution to give you more of it because for the past year, we've been working around the clock to build a business agent that solves problems for every business of every size because every business in this room and watching online should have an AI agent. Businesses like Albert Arte, a jewelry brand in Mexico. Owner Veronica Guvara was an early adopter of our business agent and has used it to risk to customers at all hours of the day so no message goes unanswered.

She tells me that it has saved her 80% of her time. It takes care of all the repetitive customer questions so she can focus on her craft and I'm excited to announce that the agent is now available across the world to the hundreds of millions of businesses on our WhatsApp business app and on Messenger that includes right here in the UK. We're making it super easy for small businesses to set up and deploy in minutes not months. The info that the AI needs to represent you is actually already there.

It's on your Facebook page, it's on your Instagram account, and it's in your business catalogs. Within minutes, it's training on the information you provide. It's really that simple. But you don't have to take it from me.

Let's bring up Rise Chocolate to set up their own agent right now. Hi, everyone. I'm in a row of Rise Chocolate, Europe's first chocolate energy bar powered by caffeine. As a small but growing Irish business, we need all the help we can get.

So I'm looking to get started with Meta Business Agent. Getting set up is super super easy. As you can see, I already have my catalogue set up. Now I just need to activate the agent.

The information meta business agent needs to think like my business is already there in my business catalogues across WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. I can share my past chats with it so it learns how I talk to customers and sounds just like me. Except for the Irish accent of course. Connect your catalogue, link your websites and you're done.

The best part overall is knowing I have the support of AI but I'm still always in control. I choose when it responds, who it responds to, and I can step in and take over any conversation whenever I want. Met a business agent is just super easy to set up in three simple steps. It really is that simple.

So, the next phase is making the agent better. Making it so that it's thinking like you, it's operating like you. So, it's not just chatting with your customers. It's engaging them intelligently.

It's answering questions, it's booking appointment, its qualifying leads and it's handling payments. So now, it's more than just time saved. It's happier customers, more sales, and ultimately better results. It's every customer getting the best version of your business all the time.

This isn't just another chatbot, it really is a true extension of your team. For the past year, businesses have been using our agent on WhatsApp and Messenger and as you just heard from Mark, we're beginning to bring the business agent to Instagram and for larger businesses, we've got the complexities of enterprise covered and we're already working with some of you in this room. You can get started now with your business agent by scanning the QR code right here.