Meta VP: AI in advertising and the rise of single-person billion-dollar company

Derya Matras serves as VP EMEA at Meta.

There is one question I keep hearing from business leaders, and it is reshaping the way I think about what comes next: “What if you started from scratch, knowing what AI can do today – how would you design your business?” It is a question worth sitting with. Because for most companies, the honest answer reveals a gap between where they are and where they could be. Not a technology gap. A mindset gap.

A year ago, I made the case that AI transforms advertising when humans and AI work together. AI is a threshold technology – it builds quietly until it crosses into everyday usefulness. We have now crossed that threshold. But too many businesses are still using it to optimise, not reimagine.

I think about it like a caterpillar entering metamorphosis. When it enters the cocoon, it does not grow wings; it dissolves completely and rebuilds something entirely new from the raw materials of everything it consumed. That is the kind of transformation AI demands: not bolting new tools onto old structures, but being willing to rethink how the whole organism works.

If we take the UK as an example, it is the third-largest AI market globally, with a government-backed investment pushing companies to scale. But the data tells a different story: too many businesses are still deploying transformative technology to do the same things they have always done, just slightly faster. That is an expensive treadmill dressed up as innovation.

What I’m seeing across........

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