Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Meta Just Made Its Latest Big Bet on Small Businesses

Meta Small Business, launched today, aims to promote mom-and-pop entrepreneurs with a little help from AI.

BY KEVIN HAYNES, NEWS WRITER

Mark Zuckerberg’s next big move: Meta Small Business, “a new top-level company initiative” launched today to boost entrepreneurship and encourage AI adoption by the business world’s so-called little guys.

While Meta’s competitors in the AI wars pursue large-scale ventures, Zuckerberg wants his company’s product managers, designers, and engineers to focus on helping the estimated 250 million small businesses worldwide that are already using Meta on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Move Builds on Meta’s Experience With Small Businesses

“Small businesses have always been the majority of our business model,” Meta’s CEO noted in a company-wide memo announcing the latest enterprise. “Tens of millions of entrepreneurs use our platforms every day to connect with customers and grow. We’ve already built the leading tools in this space, and now we’re going to do more.”

The leadership team at Meta Small Business, he said, will be fronted by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit.

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses,” Zuckerberg said. “We want to build services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.”

One of Several AI Initiatives

Meta Small Business’ introduction comes less than three months after Zuckerberg kicked off another “top-level initiative,” Meta Compute. That unit is charged with building “tens of gigawatts” of AI infrastructure by the end of the decade, he said, “and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time.”

“How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,” added Zuckerberg, who has previously said he plans to invest $600 billion in American infrastructure and jobs—“including industry-leading AI data centers”—by 2028.

© Inc.com