Mark Zuckerberg Predicts Billions Will Use Personal AI Agents Within Five Years

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes billions of people could have personal AI agents working continuously on their behalf within the next five years, as the company ramps up investment in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure required to support it.

Zuckerberg outlined his vision during Meta’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, predicting that personal agents will become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives.

“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg told investors.

He suggested that people could eventually use these AI agents for tasks involving their finances, health, personal relationships and household management.

WhatsApp could become a hub for AI agents.

As people begin interacting with multiple AI agents, Zuckerberg expectsMeta’ss messaging platforms to play an increasingly important role.

WhatsApp is already the leading Meta platform for interactions with Meta AI, according to Zuckerberg, and the company sees its messaging services as natural places for people to communicate with personal and business-focused agents.

Meta is not alone in betting heavily on agentic AI — systems capable of performing tasks on behalf of users rather than simply responding to questions.

Google has emphasised customised AI agents as part of its overhaul of Search, although its growing use of AI-generated results has also drawn criticism from some users. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen strong demand for Claude and its agentic coding product Claude Code.

Meta’s AI ambitions come with enormous costs

Meta’s push into AI continues to require substantial spending, and investors have shown concern about the company’s growing expenses. Meta shares fell almost 10% following its latest quarterly earnings report.

Reality Labs, Meta’s division responsible for augmented reality glasses, virtual reality headsets and related software, recorded a loss of approximately $4.6 billion during the quarter.

The division has consistently reported multibillion-dollar quarterly losses since 2021, bringing its cumulative losses to around $88 billion.

AI infrastructure is adding another major source of spending. Meta reported free cash flow of $784 million for the quarter, down from $8.55 billion during the same period a year earlier, representing a decline of roughly 91%.

The company continues investing heavily in the data centres and computing infrastructure required to train and operate increasingly powerful AI systems.

This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to develop a $14 billion data centre in El Paso, Texas.

Meta sees AI intelligence as a major revenue opportunity

Zuckerberg said Meta believes selling AI-powered intelligence could ultimately produce significantly higher margins than simply selling computing capacity. However, the company also sees an opportunity to generate revenue directly from compute.

Meta is attempting to balance those potential short-term commercial opportunities with its need to preserve enough infrastructure for its own long-term AI development.

Zuckerberg expects personal AI agents to eventually form the foundation of Meta’s next generation of products and revenue streams.

The company already has some early evidence that businesses are willing to adopt its agent technology. Meta said more than one million businesses are using the business agents it rolled out globally through WhatsApp and Messenger during the quarter.

Convincing consumers to adopt personal AI agents at comparable scale may prove more difficult. But if Zuckerberg’s prediction is correct, Meta sees today’s business deployments as only an early stage of a much larger shift toward AI systems that continuously work on behalf of individual users.