Meta

Meta obtains almost all of its revenue through advertising, but a much smaller business line stood out in its latest financial statement for a specific reason: it grew at almost three times the rate. ai, a Swedish startup founded by two former Shopify executives. ai's team and technology will be integrated into Meta to strengthen Meta Business Agent, the artificial intelligence assistant that the company offers to businesses. The tool already handles customer inquiries from over one million businesses through WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, where it answers questions, recommends products, schedules appointments, and identifies when a conversation requires a salesperson's involvement.

The next goal points directly to commerce: Meta wants its assistant to also be able to finalize sales. Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, the founders of Stilla, had already worked on solutions to simplify payments before launching the startup. (Photo: Stilla) The change is easy to understand. Meta wants its apps to go from being a space where businesses display ads to becoming a channel where they can also finalize sales. Over 200 million companies already use WhatsApp Business, and the idea is to leverage these conversations so that customers can inquire, buy, and pay without leaving the application.

The founders of Stilla, Siavash Ghorbani and Kaj Drobin, already had experience in payment systems before creating the startup. In 2018, they sold their previous company to Shopify and, later, worked on Shop Pay, the company's tool that allows completing a purchase with a single tap. That journey gave them experience in simplifying one of the most sensitive moments in online commerce: the payment process. Their new startup seeks to solve a key problem of AI assistants. Many of these tools lose context when a conversation ends and, faced with a new inquiry, practically start from scratch.

Stilla's software avoids that break and allows the assistant to retain customer information, even if the company uses different platforms. Thus, it can remember who the customer is, what they bought before, and if they had any pending claims. Mark Zuckerberg Crédito: Anthony Quintano from Honolulu- Wikimedia Commons - Wikimedia Commons That ability to remember completely changes the assistant's role. A common chatbot responds to an inquiry and loses context when the conversation ends. In contrast, one that retains customer information can resume a purchase, recall previous orders, and provide continuity to a claim.

That allows it to intervene in more stages of the customer relationship, and that is precisely the value Meta wants to add. Stilla, furthermore, is only eight months old. The startup launched in January with an initial round of US$ 5 million. Its short trajectory indicates that Meta did not focus solely on the product, but also on the team that developed the technology and on the experience of its founders. The sequence of dates shows that Meta is moving fast with Business Agent. The company launched the assistant globally on June 3 and started charging for the service on August 1.

In September, it also agreed to acquire Stilla's team to improve the tool. Added to that is another change. As of October 1, messages that businesses send via WhatsApp will have an additional cost. Meta launched Business Agent in June and, two months later, started charging for the service. (Photo: Meta translated with AI) The billing method depends on the size of each company. Smaller companies access the assistant through a WhatsApp Business Premium subscription. 05 per response. Meta also added the assistant to the corporate plans of Meta One, the subscription package it introduced last week and which has prices of up to US$ 499 per month.

In this way, the company charges for the same technology in different ways, depending on the type and size of the client. The first results of that strategy are already visible in the accounts. During the second quarter, Meta's applications division's other revenues exceeded US$ 1 billion for the first time. The figure represented a 73% increase compared to the same period last year. According to the company, a good part of that jump was due to paid messaging and WhatsApp subscriptions. In comparison, advertising revenues increased by 27%. However, that business is still small compared to the US$ 60 billion that the applications division billed in the quarter.

The biggest threat does not seem to come from other tech giants, but from software companies like HubSpot, which charge SMEs for customer management, sales, and marketing campaigns. If Meta manages to concentrate these tasks on WhatsApp and Instagram, part of that expense could disappear.