Mark Zuckerberg Predicts Billions Will Have Personal AI Agents

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that billions of people will have personal artificial intelligence (AI) agents within the next five years. Speaking during the company’s quarterly earnings conference with investors on Wednesday (29/7), Zuckerberg said, “I think it is very unlikely, if you look five years from now, for example — whatever time period you want — that you won’t have billions of people with personal agents that understand your goals and that work on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever area you care about.” He believes people in the future will use AI agents to help them manage financial matters, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management. “As we move towards a future where we all interact with many agents, I think WhatsApp and our other messaging platforms will become increasingly important,” Zuckerberg said, adding that WhatsApp is already a leading platform where users interact with Meta AI. Google has emphasised personalised AI agents as a key new feature in its search service updates, sparking protests from users who feel overwhelmed by the influx of AI results. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s subscription service Claude has soared as tech engineers admire the agent-based coding assistant Claude Code. Compared to its competitors, Meta may not yet enjoy the same trust from investors, as it continues to pour funds into innovative projects that may or may not succeed. Meta’s stock was reported to have fallen nearly 10 per cent during the company’s earnings announcement this quarter. Meta Reality Labs, the organisation responsible for AR glasses, VR headsets, and related software, suffered a loss of approximately 4.6 billion US dollars this quarter. The division has been losing money since 2021, with total losses now around 88 billion US dollars. The company reported free cash flow of 784 million US dollars this quarter, down from 8.55 billion US dollars in the same quarter last year, a 91 per cent year-on-year decline exacerbated by the company’s investment in AI infrastructure. “We believe that the profit margins from selling artificial intelligence will remain much higher than selling compute directly, but we think there is a big opportunity, of course, to sell compute as well,” Zuckerberg said. He is convinced the personal agents being developed by Meta will become “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the coming months and years.” Meta’s business agents, launched globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have so far been adopted by more than one million businesses.