Inside Metas play to turn 250M SMBs into AI customers

Meta is making a play for Main Street.The tech giant is launching Meta Small Business, an aggressive initiative offering the 250 million small and medium businesses that use its platform a suite of new AI tools.The company is betting that smaller enterprises will drive its next growth phase as its core ad business faces mounting legal heat.“Small businesses have always been the largest category of our business,” Zuckerberg wrote in an internal post on Wednesday that was reviewed by NYNext.

“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses.We want to build the services that enable this.”The initiative will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit, reporting directly to Zuckerberg.

The pair will build on a base of over 300 million small businesses already running on Meta’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.“I’ve seen firsthand that small business owners don’t fear new challenges — they’re resourceful, creative, and relentlessly solution-oriented,” Powell McCormick told NYNext.This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).The play comes amid an intensifying AI arms race, with tech titans scrambling to stake out territory as the advertising and marketing landscape changes and consumers embrace products like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.The push taps into an untapped AI market: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) spend over $400 billion annually on digital marketing and business tools.While larger enterprise clients have embraced sophisticated AI solutions, smaller operations have been less of a focus, despite representing the vast majority of global businesses.Meta is well-positioned in this space: many small businesses are already using Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for advertising ...