Meta put consumer AI agents at the center of its revenue plan on July 29, 2026, when it reported second-quarter results and then used much of the earnings call to lay out a consumer agent business that has not launched yet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that personal agents will be “the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead,” and said the company would have more to share soon.
Zuckerberg sorted Meta’s AI work into three buckets on the call. AI is already lifting the core advertising and recommendations business. A third line sells to companies: model APIs, business agents, and in some cases compute capacity directly to large customers. The first is already in the quarter’s revenue, the third has a billing date, and the second is the one he spent the most time on.
What Meta already sells
The agent product Meta has in market is aimed at businesses. Meta Business Agent became available globally on WhatsApp and Messenger during the quarter, and Zuckerberg said more than 1 million businesses now use one every week to answer customers or complete sales. It is rolling out on Instagram as well.
Meta introduced Business Agent at its Conversations conference on June 3, 2026, describing an agent that answers questions about a business, recommends products from its catalog, books appointments, qualifies leads, closes sales, and hands off to a person when the business decides it should. Alongside it, the company announced the Meta Business Agent Platform, which connects agents to outside systems including Shopify (SHOP ) and Zendesk and adds the enterprise-grade controls, guardrails and measurement large customers want before letting software transact on their behalf. Those controls have become a competitive surface across the industry: Google has been shipping similar machinery, including developer-level blocks on what Gemini agents are allowed to call.
CFO Susan Li gave one deployment figure on the call. Movida, a Brazilian rental-car company with nearly 400 locations, put an agent on WhatsApp to run the full booking flow from vehicle selection through payment. Meta says Movida reported a 44% year-over-year increase in daily bookings through the channel over a one-month stretch, and that 85% of conversations were resolved without a human stepping in.
What the agents will cost
Getting started with Business Agent is free, and Meta’s announcement said paid subscription tiers would follow, with options for businesses of every size. Its WhatsApp developer documentation now dates that change: pricing for Meta Business Agent messages begins on August 1, 2026, followed by a round of changes to service and utility message pricing on October 1, 2026.
Zuckerberg described the current mix as subscriptions plus volume-based pricing, and said he expects these products to converge on the model that runs Meta’s ad system, where a business pays only when Meta delivers a result. Over time, he said, that would let Meta run an auction over its own compute the way it runs one over ad inventory. That is a pricing architecture rather than a feature, and it is the part buyers should read closely. Outcome pricing shifts the cost of a failed conversation onto Meta and makes agent spend look like performance marketing budget instead of a software subscription.
The spending behind the roadmap
The quarter shows what the roadmap costs. Revenue rose 28% to $60.80 billion, while total costs and expenses climbed 55% to $42.03 billion, including $2.40 billion of legal charges and $1.18 billion of severance tied to the May 2026 headcount reduction of about 8,000 employees. Operating income fell 8% to $18.78 billion and operating margin narrowed to 31% from 43%. Capital expenditures reached $31.08 billion for the quarter, and free cash flow came in at $784 million against $8.55 billion a year earlier. The stock dropped in after-hours trading.
The guidance tightened around the buildout rather than easing off it:
- Third-quarter revenue of $61 billion to $64 billion
- Full-year 2026 expenses of $165 billion to $169 billion, with the low end raised to absorb the legal charges
- 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion, narrowed from a prior range of $125 billion to $145 billion
Li said Meta expects to stay demand-constrained for the foreseeable future, and that the industry has not built enough capacity for the pace of AI adoption. That is why the plan concentrates on maximizing 2026 and 2027 capacity while leaving 2028 chip decisions open. The company announced a venture with BlackRock on July 28, 2026 (BLK ) to develop a 1-gigawatt campus in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock-managed funds holding 80% and Meta 20% of roughly $14 billion in development costs. That capacity is expected to begin coming online in 2028.
Meta’s argument for winning consumer agents is distribution. Instagram crossed 2 billion daily actives in the quarter, WhatsApp is the app where people most often reach Meta AI, and daily interactions with the assistant are up 60% since Meta rebuilt it on its Muse Spark model and added task-running features.
The nearest dated marker is billing. From August 1, 2026, business agent conversations start carrying a charge, turning a free global rollout into a metered product line and giving Meta its first real read on what companies will pay an agent to close a sale. The consumer version follows on a roadmap Zuckerberg said has to produce something that “just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people to adopt and use.”
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