Meta Platforms is among the U.S. tech giants leading the race to invest in generative AI and the foundational large language models that the AI breakthroughs rely on, and it’s also taken an open-source approach to its AI development, allowing the tech innovations to be shared widely.
Those innovations are occurring rapidly. “Not just daily. It’s evolving multiple times a day,” says Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta.
Its Llama LLMs, available to developers around the world, have been downloaded over 800 million times. Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents, the latest trend in generative AI.
The AI agents won’t just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action — surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that’s where Shih comes in. Meta’s AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses.
“Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we’re building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that’s happening,” she told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series.
She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide.
“We’re quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they’re going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice — the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses,” Shih said.
While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, “doing fancy things like fine tuning models,” as Shih put it, “If you’re a small business — you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you’re distributing through Instagram — you don’t have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won’t have to.”
For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life.
For consumers, Shih says, “Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends.”
Rival OpenAI recently launched its Operator AI for tasks like travel planning.
On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. “They’re using WhatsApp, they’re using Facebook, they’re using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7.”
The more AI does, the less people have to do, at least in traditional definitions of roles. Shih says every person must prepare now for the changes that will be coming. “There isn’t a single job that hasn’t been completely transformed by the internet and by mobile and by social media. I think we’re at the same juncture now with AI, where it’s clear that there are certain professions where AI will significantly change the job. But my prediction is that over time, AI will change every job function across every industry,” she told Boorstin.
Her advice for every individual and every company is “to learn, to experiment, to understand and to almost define what that [AI transformation] could look like for their particular job.”
“Just like in 1990 we had to learn email, we had to learn search. I think today, everyone, regardless of where they live, what job they have or want to have, needs to learn AI,” she said.
The good news? According to Shih, AI makes it easier to learn. “You can talk to it. You can literally talk to it.”
She’s been doing that herself. “Something that I often do is, if there’s long research papers, AI research papers, or there’s developments, you can ask AI. You can use Meta AI, and it’ll break it down for you. You can ask it, ‘Explain this at a ninth grade level, explain this at a fifth grade level,’ and it’ll do it. And you can kind of go back and forth. And so that’s how I learn a lot of the more complicated topics.”
The full interview with Shih is available at CNBC Changemakers and on CNBC’s YouTube channel.