WhatsApp gets an AI sales assistant that closes deals autonomously

Meta introduced an AI business agent that uses Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp to schedule meetings, manage payments, and close deals for companies. The statement was made on Wednesday at Meta’s Conversations conference in London. It places the business in direct rivalry with Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Over 1 million businesses already use older chatbots on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new agent acts on its own instead of walking users through prewritten scripts. “We actually want to take actions now. We actually want it to be able to complete the payment, to process the booking, to place the order,” Naomi Gleit, Meta’s head of product, told Reuters . She called it a shift away from “rule-based automations” that older business bots relied on. Meta’s new agent vets sales leads The Business Agent fields customer questions across Meta’s messaging apps and matches the company’s brand voice. It answers common questions, vets sales leads, and passes tricky stuff to human staff. Businesses get it free at launch. Paid tiers are coming later. Meta is also launching a Business Agent Platform. Its infrastructure lets companies build custom AI agents for work outside Meta’s apps. The platform hooks into hundreds of third party tools like Shopify, Zendesk, and Shopee. It includes enterprise controls and analytics, the company said. Gleit runs a new team called Enterprise Solutions, formed during an AI focused restructure. The team will plant engineers directly inside big customers’ offices. It’s a move borrowed from AI startups like Anthropic, who use embedded engineers to get past internal pushback and write custom integrations. The unit’s first project is the new business agents, but it’s also working on AI tools for internal company workflows. Gleit said she’s trying to merge several overlapping AI agents Meta has built, including an internal productivity tool, a consumer facing Meta AI support bot, and a global ads assistant. “The number one thing I hear, especially from small businesses, is ‘I just want to go to one place that can do all the things,'” Gleit said. Meta embeds business tools where customers already message Meta’s approach goes after reach. WhatsApp alone has over 2 billion users. Instagram and Messenger add billions more. Meta is essentially dropping business automation into messaging platforms where customers already hang out. The company is also dumping money into the AI infrastructure needed to make this work. Meta is pulling together ~ $13 billion in financing for its El Paso, Texas data center campus through Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan, according to Cryptopolitan. That facility started as a $1.5 billion commitment in October 2025 and has grown into a one gigawatt campus. At its Q1 2026 earnings call on April 29, Meta lifted its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $115 billion and $145 billion. Almost all of it goes toward AI data centers, Cryptopolitan reported. At the time of writing, META is trading at $618.78 with gains of 3.54% today. Google Finance shows that Meta Platforms Inc is in the green zone with +20.84. The business agent launches globally today. Any size company can use it. Meta didn’t say when the paid subscription tiers will arrive. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .