The $1 trillion club is full of artificial intelligence (AI) innovators and facilitators. The next company likely to join the group just showcased some of its newest generative AI capabilities.
Meta Platforms (META 0.16%) debuted several generative AI tools for its 3.88 billion monthly active users at its Meta Connect event at the end of September. It has its own AI assistant and created dozens of AI-powered chatbots based on celebrity likenesses.
It has a new image generator that can create stickers for messaging apps, and it can edit your Instagram photos in seconds to make it look like you just got back from a vacation in Venice. (Just ignore the message saying the photo was generated by AI.)
While Meta's AI tools could increase engagement with its apps among consumers, it's what's going on behind the scenes that can really propel the company back into the $1 trillion club.
Building better business chatbots
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees that WhatsApp and Messenger are very likely the next pillars of growth for the company.
The business-facing AI studio that Meta released at its Connect conference is one way it could drive revenue for the business. Making it easy for businesses to create useful chatbots within WhatsApp and Messenger is key for driving more businesses to use the apps as primary customer-service platforms. And Meta showed how companies can inject personality into their bots with its own AI personality characters based on celebrities.
With effective bots that can scale with demand and reduce overhead, it will drive two important revenue sources for Meta's messaging businesses. First, more businesses will sign up to use Messenger and WhatsApp, including its WhatsApp for Business platform. Second, it will grow click-to-message ad sales, as businesses can quickly scale up their customer interactions through chats.
Combined with the consumer-facing services that can make using WhatsApp or Messenger more fun, Meta is doing what it does best: drawing more consumers to its apps and then connecting businesses with those consumers in an efficient way. It's creating value, and it should be rewarded for that by businesses and investors.
Expanding on Llama 2
All of Meta's AI tools are built on its Llama 2 model, which already has a lot of traction with developers, and seeing what Meta built could drive more developers to use it over other foundational models.
That benefits Meta in a couple of ways. First, more developers tinkering with Llama 2 opens the door for new and innovative ideas that Meta could implement itself. That could be anything from a more efficient model, a more task-specific model, or even new applications.
Llama 2 is already one of the most competitive generative AI models in terms of performance. There's very high potential for Meta to leapfrog the competition to introduce a better platform than its competitors.
Unlike many other AI competitors, Meta has AI strategies within its business to fuel revenue growth in two key ways. And when you combine these, it has massive potential:
- Increase engagement: As noted, consumer-facing AI applications can get users to spend more time on Meta's family of apps and even push users across its apps. For example, the prompt "Show me a good dinner recipe for tonight" could have Meta's AI assistant send a user to an Instagram post.
- Make advertising easier: Generative AI has the potential to bring in smaller advertisers to Facebook and Instagram. One big challenge in social media advertising is coming up with effective creatives (in copy and images) that drive results. Meta's generative AI tools can do that hard work for them and test which creatives get the best results. It already does a version of this with Advantage+.
Joining the $1 trillion club
As of this writing, Meta shares trade for about $300, good for a market cap of just over $772 billion. The share price needs to climb nearly 30% to reach the $1 trillion milestone.
But it's not uncharted territory for Meta. It hit the $1 trillion mark in June of 2021, back when we were still calling it Facebook.
Meta's AI innovations give it a ticket back into the club. It didn't just release an AI chatbot that can compete with other $1 trillion club members' versions; it can do more with AI than anybody else right now.
