Meta greenlights Facebook, Instagram ads based on your AI chats
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta will soon show ads and other content to users based on their interactions with the company’s digital assistant and related products powered by generative artificial intelligence.
The social media giant announced the update to its recommendation system on Wednesday, and said it will go into effect on Dec. 16. Users will receive notifications of the change starting on Oct. 7.
The move underscores how Meta is attempting to better tie its billion-dollar investments into generative AI with its core online advertising business.
Meta spent the summer on a major AI hiring and spending blitz, and said in July during its second-quarter earnings report that the AI initiatives will “result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth.”
The company currently provides generative AI abilities to users via its Meta AI digital assistant, which is bundled across its apps like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta AI is also available as a stand-alone app and website.
Users can interact with Meta AI like they do with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, asking it to provide directions or generate images based on prompts.
The Mark Zuckerberg-helmed company also said that the Meta AI digital assistant now has more than 1 billion active monthly users, although that figure is not specific to the Meta AI stand-alone app.
Zuckerberg said in May that Meta AI reached 1 billion monthly active users, and added that eventually “there will be opportunities to either insert paid recommendations” or offer “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”
Meta privacy and data policy manager Christy Harris said during a media briefing that people already assumed that the Facebook parent was incorporating generative AI interactions with ad targeting and content recommendation.
“While this is a natural progression of our personalization efforts and will help give us even better recommendations for people, we want to be super transparent about it and provide a heads up before we actually begin using this data in a new way, even if people already thought that we were doing this,” Harris said.
Harris provided an example of how the update could influence the kinds of content and ads people may see across Facebook, Instagram and other Meta-related apps.
When users chat with Meta AI about how to plan their family vacations, the digital assistant’s responses could influence the kinds of Reels short videos they may be recommended to watch on Facebook, for instance.
“So the Reels that I see on my Facebook feed or other types of content that is recommended to me could include family friendly travel destinations,” Harris said. “It could include ads for hotels or other signals that would be informed by the conversation that I have had with Meta AI.”
People’s voice interactions with the Meta AI digital assistant when wearing the company’s Ray-Ban Meta glasses will also influence the company’s recommendation engine, Harris said.
“So whether you’re using your keyboard to type your interactions or you are using the audio version of an interaction, those signals will still be used,” she said.
The recommendation update will not take into account user interactions with Meta AI via WhatsApp unless people link their accounts on the messaging service to other sibling apps like Instagram, Harris said.
People will not be able to opt out of the upcoming recommendation engine change, but if they don’t interact with Meta AI, the “update won’t apply to them,” Harris said.
Meta plans to debut the recommendation update to users in the U.K. and the EU “following our usual regulatory updates,” Harris said.
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President of Microsoft North America Judson Althoff speaks on stage during We Day at KeyArena on April 23, 2015 in Seattle, Washington.
Mat Hayward | Getty Images
Microsoft‘s top-ranking sales leader, Judson Althoff, has been promoted to a bigger role as CEO of the company’s commercial business.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, wrote in a memo on Wednesday that marketing and operations will move under Althoff’s organization. Most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from commercial offerings such as productivity software subscriptions and cloud-based Nvidia chips for running artificial intelligence models.
“Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate,” Nadella wrote in the email. “To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation.”
Althoff, who joined from Oracle as president of Microsoft’s North America business in 2013, was already among Microsoft’s highest-paid executives, receiving over $23 million in total pay in the 2024 fiscal year. His most recent title was executive vice president and chief commercial officer.
Under Nadella, who replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014, Microsoft has more frequently used the CEO title for select executives.
LinkedIn has had a CEO since Microsoft acquired the company in 2016. Last year Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of the DeepMind AI lab now owned by Google, and made him CEO of a group called Microsoft AI that includes Bing. And GitHub, which Microsoft bought in 2018, had a CEO until last month, when Thomas Dohmke left the company.
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Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, speaks at a company briefing in Redmond, Wash., on May 20, 2024. Microsoft unveiled a new category of PC that features generative artificial intelligence tools built into Windows, the company’s world-leading operating system.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft said Wednesday that it will stop promoting a consumer subscription for artificial intelligence services and introduced a bundle blending AI features with traditional productivity apps.
The software company introduced Copilot Pro at $20 per month in early 2024. Microsoft 365 Family, which allows for up to six users and 6 terabytes of cloud storage, goes for $12.99 each month. The new Microsoft 365 Premium tier essentially combines both and will cost $19.99 a month.
“Other AI tools stop at chat — we deliver that plus so much more,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer marketing leader, wrote in a statement provided to CNBC.
Microsoft is not discontinuing Copilot Pro, a spokesperson said.
Technology companies have been trying to capitalize on the broad interest in tapping generative AI models to compose documents and create videos.
Microsoft offers a free version of its Copilot assistant, in line with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, all of which sell paid subscriptions for consumers.
Microsoft 365 Premium comes with higher usage limits than the free Copilot and productivity software subscriptions targeting consumers.
As was the case with Copilot Pro and with consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions, the new offering enables conversations with Copilot in Microsoft’s Office apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Microsoft is sweetening the new offer with forthcoming access to two AI reasoning agents that so far have only been available to corporate workers with Microsoft 365 Copilot subscriptions.
OpenAI relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to run its ChatGPT assistant and its underlying models, and Microsoft incorporates the models into its Copilot. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI. The companies are partners that also compete.
Microsoft reported 89 million consumer subscribers for Microsoft 365 services in the June quarter, up 8%. Revenue growth from those products has accelerated for three quarters in a row, reaching 20% in the June quarter.
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