Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents — without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.)
“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 on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.
He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.
“As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.
Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf rather than just answer questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its Search overhaul, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over the agentic coding assistant Claude Code.
