There is a particular kind of corporate optimism that sounds best when delivered from a position of strength. Mark Zuckerberg offered a generous helping of it on Wednesday, describing a future in which artificial intelligence agents sell things on behalf of small businesses, manage advertising campaigns with minimal human intervention, and generally justify the billions of dollars Meta has been pouring into its Superintelligence Labs.

Wall Street, for its part, responded by marking the shares down.

The company reported that its AI-powered advertising tools are producing measurable results — an 8 percent increase in ad clicks, a 15.7 percent lift in conversions on Facebook — and that its Advantage+ campaign management system has reached a $75 billion annual revenue run rate. Mr. Zuckerberg said more than a million businesses are now using Meta's AI agents to communicate with customers across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, with nine million small businesses employing at least one of the company's AI creative tools.

(Whether those small businesses know they are employing AI creative tools is, perhaps, a separate question.)

The strategy, as Mr. Zuckerberg described it, involves offering high-quality AI models for free to encourage developer adoption — a familiar playbook from the platform wars of the previous decade, now applied to the somewhat more expensive business of training large language models. The eventual payoff, he suggested, would come through outcomes-based pricing: "Effectively we will get paid when we deliver results for those businesses."

That eventual payoff, however, remains eventual. The company's third-quarter revenue guidance came in below expectations, and investors who had grown accustomed to rewarding AI spending on faith appeared to want something more concrete in return.

Meta, which has been aggressively recruiting engineering talent and building what it calls a "business-in-a-box service," is betting that the infrastructure it builds today will become indispensable tomorrow. It is a reasonable bet. It is also, for the moment, an expensive one.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Meta’s Tepid Revenue Outlook Undercuts its AI Spending Spree"