Meta used its Conversations 2026 conference in London to take its Business Agent global — an AI agent that answers customers, sells products, and books appointments on behalf of businesses across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
The pitch: every business, “as if they had an infinite team behind them.” The Business Agent answers customer questions around the clock, recommends products from a business’s catalog, schedules appointments, qualifies leads, and closes sales — handing the conversation to a human whenever a customer needs more than the AI can offer. It speaks customers’ local languages and adapts to each brand’s tone.
More than one million businesses were already using a Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger during the earlier rollout phase. With the global expansion, Meta says any business can have its agent live within minutes.
For larger organizations, Meta introduced the Meta Business Agent Platform — agentic infrastructure for building, customizing, and deploying agents at scale, with connections to hundreds of business systems including Shopify and Zendesk so agents can take real actions, not just chat.
Getting started is free, with paid subscription tiers arriving in the coming months for businesses of every size.
The launch is Meta’s most aggressive move yet to monetize business messaging — a market especially significant in the Middle East, where WhatsApp is the default channel between businesses and customers. Kantar research shared alongside the launch underlines how central business messaging has become to commerce across the region.
The strategic subtext is hard to miss: as OpenAI, Google, and a wave of startups race to sell AI agents to enterprises, Meta is leveraging the one asset none of them have — the messaging apps where customers already are.
