Meta shares drop as Zuckerberg bets on personal AI agents to drive revenue

Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday that billions of people will use personal artificial intelligence agents within five years. The chief executive presented the technology as the core driver for future product development and income.

These agents would operate around the clock to manage finances, health and household tasks. “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 said.

He positioned WhatsApp and other messaging surfaces as the primary interface for this future. WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with the company's artificial intelligence, and the business recently rolled out commercial agents to over one million companies globally.

The vision failed to reassure markets, with shares dropping almost ten percent following the earnings report. Investors are increasingly wary of the massive cash burn, as free cash flow plummeted 91 percent year-over-year to $784 million.

This decline is driven by heavy investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. To support the anticipated demand, the company and BlackRock announced a partnership this week to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.

The spending compounds existing losses in the Reality Labs division, which handles virtual and augmented reality hardware. That unit lost roughly $4.6 billion this quarter, bringing its cumulative deficit since 2021 to approximately $88 billion.

The firm is not alone in pursuing autonomous software. Google recently integrated custom agents into its search overhaul, while subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude coding assistant have surged among engineers.

Despite the high costs, Zuckerberg defended the financial strategy behind the infrastructure build-out. “We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there’s a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well,” he noted.

For European regulators and markets watching the technology sector, this pivot highlights a critical transition. The industry is moving from simple query-response models to autonomous agents, requiring unprecedented capital expenditure that will test investor patience in the coming years.