Ad extinction: Mark Zuckerberg takes on advertising industry with Meta’s AI arsenal
The company is actively exploring ways to turn its AI assistant into a revenue-generating tool while maintaining broad targeting appeal for advertisers across its platforms.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed that the U.S. tech giant will add premium plans to its recently launched AI assistant – the Meta AI app. In an interview held with Stratechery, the 40-year-old also shed light on enhancing Meta’s AI capabilities across the whole ecosystem to build a more immersive experience for its users.
Meta launched its AI assistant recently, signalling the entry of another rival with the likes of Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude already leading the fray.
The Zuckerberg Vision
“Our focus for this year is…making Meta AI the leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalisation, voice conversations, and entertainment,” the Meta CEO said.
“As AI unlocks more productivity in the economy, I expect that people will spend more of their time on entertainment and culture which will create an even larger opportunity to create more engaging experiences across all apps.”
The Meta AI app, launched in April, joins an already robust social media ecosystem including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Currently, it’s free for use across both iOS and Android devices. It comes with a Discover feed that allows users to share how they are using AI to generate results. This feature also signals an additional base for serving product recommendations or ads to users.
“I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s earnings call. However, he remained coy on finer details regarding when the subscription tiers will be released.
A news for Meta advertisers
Zuckerberg also focused on Meta’s commitment towards enhancing the ads business by using AI.
The Harvard University dropout also confirmed how AI capabilities have helped Meta become better at targeting through broad options, edging advertisers to ditch the usual targeting options in the ads manager dashboard.