Meta's CFO Susan Li has a new AI customer in mind: corporate America

Meta thinks the enterprise AI race is still wide open, and it’s starting to talk like a company that wants a seat at that table. On Wednesday, CFO Susan Li said AI is “creating huge amounts of disruption in enterprise today” and argued that traditional software firms do not have the market locked down.

That’s the frame for Meta’s latest push: a Meta Enterprise Platform announced on Sept. 28, with former MongoDB CEO Chirantan “CJ” Desai brought in to help build it. The company wants to bundle its models with business-facing products, APIs and AI agents tied into its messaging and social apps. The aim is broad enough to cover software development, productivity, sales, marketing and customer service.

Meta isn’t pretending this will pay off next quarter. Li called it a long-term opportunity that could take shape over multiple years, and said the company will scale investment only as customer demand and product-market fit show up. But she also sketched the prize pretty clearly: a new recurring revenue stream that doesn’t depend on ads alone. Subscriptions, usage-based APIs, messaging and other business models are all on the table.

The company is already using consumer adoption as proof that people will try its AI products. Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set up Muse personal agents within six weeks of launch, with about 25% using them on any given day. That’s a consumer signal, not an enterprise one, but Meta is clearly hoping the same habit can be sold uphill into company budgets.

The money is there to make the bet. Third-quarter revenue rose 26% year over year to $64.6 billion, above Wall Street’s expectations of $63.3 billion, while the average price per ad climbed 14%. Capital expenditures, including finance lease principal payments, hit $34.9 billion in the quarter, and Meta lifted the low end of its full-year capex forecast to $135 billion. The ad machine is paying for the AI ambition, for now.