Why Meta Is Expanding AI Tools for Small Businesses

Meta Wants to Help Small Businesses Adopt AI

On March 25, 2026, Axios reported that Meta is launching Meta Small Business, a company-wide initiative to support small business owners in starting businesses and adopting AI. In an internal memo, Zuckerberg called for participation across multiple job functions.

The memo laid out the goal of making sure more business owners can capture the economic opportunities AI creates. Watching this announcement, I found myself wondering what kind of tools Meta plans to offer to the business owners who are already using its services.

Many businesses are already using the service

Meta’s 2025 revenue was approximately $201.0 billion, with advertising revenue of about $196.2 billion — roughly 97.6% of the total.¹ According to Axios, more than 250 million small businesses worldwide use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. That doesn’t mean all of them are paying advertisers or already using AI ad tools.

I’m a Meta shareholder and generally optimistic about the company’s prospects. So I was surprised when a subscriber I know told me I seem to cover a lot of bad news about Meta. I think advertising strategies or AI investments that consumers might find uncomfortable still deserve to be examined separately for the value they create for advertisers and businesses.

Running ads on their own requires small businesses to create creative, define targeting, and monitor budgets and performance. Automation tools can ease that burden. If more businesses start advertising, or keep running ads that perform well, that should help Meta’s revenue too. That said, increasing spend per advertiser hasn’t been announced as this initiative’s official KPI, and it should be distinguished from ARPU² measured on a general-user basis.

Meta already operates a suite of ad-automation products called Advantage+. Advertisers can automate targeting, budget, and placement together, or automate just specific steps. In a 2025 presentation, Meta said its internal research found an average return of $4.52 in revenue per $1 of ad spend — 22% higher than with traditional methods. This is an average from that particular study and doesn’t guarantee results for any individual advertiser. ROAS measures revenue attributed to ads relative to ad spend, so it should also be distinguished from actual profit after costs are deducted.

The executives running the business

Reports name senior executives, including Dina Powell McCormick and Naomi Gleit, as leaders of this initiative. Their backgrounds suggest an approach that ties together the existing business base with product development.

Dina Powell McCormick is President and Vice Chairman of Meta. According to Meta’s official bio, she spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she led economic development programs including 10,000 Small Businesses. She has also served in the U.S. government, including as Deputy National Security Advisor. Among her experience, I think the small-business support program is the piece most relevant to this new role.

Head of Product Naomi Gleit is an executive who has been with Facebook since its early days. Her involvement can be read as connecting to the task of building and running business-facing features within existing services.

That said, the credentials of the people in charge, or who’s involved, don’t tell us the specific features or the scope of the rollout. We’ll need to watch for which features actually launch, and for businesses in which countries.

Meta’s strength lies in existing business accounts and customer touchpoints

AI-driven commerce competition involves several distinct kinds of work. A consumer searching for a product, a merchant managing an order, and an advertiser reaching a new customer are all connected tasks — but each requires different information and different capabilities.

Under the banner of agentic commerce³, features that help consumers search, compare, and purchase products are being discussed. Once you fold in merchant-facing tools and ad automation as well, it starts to look like every company is solving the same problem. When comparing them, it’s better to first separate out whose workload is being reduced, and for which specific task.

Meta’s strength is that businesses are already meeting customers through Pages, business accounts, and messaging. That doesn’t mean competitors have no customer relationships or data at all. Nor does running a messaging service mean a company can freely use every conversation for advertising.

Meta’s cross-app Daily Active People (DAP) averaged 3.58 billion in December 2025. This isn’t a simple sum of account counts across individual apps — it’s an estimate of users across multiple apps. What’s clear is that the user base available for introducing new tools is enormous.

If businesses can access new features from the accounts they already use, the friction of switching to a new service goes down. But that doesn’t eliminate the need to learn how to set advertising goals and budgets, or how to interpret the results.

Oswarld’s Lens

I think this direction plays well to Meta’s existing strengths. In looking at go-to-market strategy, I’ve seen plenty of cases where a good feature gets adopted slowly simply because users face the burden of learning something new and changing how they already work. For small business owners short on time and manpower, that burden can matter a great deal.

Offering tools inside a screen that’s already familiar to anyone running a Facebook Page or Instagram account should make it easy to get started. Once a business builds up creative assets and operating experience within that system, though, switching to a different tool could carry real costs. That said, how easy onboarding actually is, and how hard switching away later becomes, depends on the actual features and how they’re run.

What I keep wanting to see is whether advertisers actually come out ahead. Even if automation drives more revenue, if ad spend, product costs, and return costs rise along with it, the net benefit to the business could be smaller than it looks. Meta’s average price per ad in 2025 rose 9% year over year, but that figure can’t be read as meaning every small business’s CPM went up 9%. Nor is it evidence that this new AI tool caused the price increase.

Even without a tool usage fee, running ads still costs money. I think the better approach is to track not just whether the features got easier to use, but how much actual customers and profit grew on the same budget.

Closing

Meta Small Business is planning to expand AI adoption among the large base of merchants already using its services. If advertising and business operations become easier, it benefits merchants — and it’s a growth opportunity for Meta as well.

That said, a usage scale of 250 million doesn’t tell us anything about actual automation adoption rates or outcomes. What matters is how many merchants actually used these tools, which tasks they reduced, and whether they actually helped acquire customers.

For small business owners, the convenience of a tool has to be weighed against the ad spend it requires. Rather than increasing budget based solely on the average ROAS the platform reports, it’s important to judge based on your own business’s revenue and costs.

If you’re already running Meta ads, it’s worth checking exactly which settings Advantage+ automates. I’m curious how existing Korean services where merchants meet customers — like Danggeun (a Korean neighborhood marketplace app) or Naver Place (Naver’s local business listing service) — will roll out similar tools. I think it’s worth watching from the angle of adding features that support workflows merchants are already using.

References

• Meta, Understanding Meta Advantage+ in Two Minutes, April 2025. This piece explains what gets automated and lays out the performance figures the company has released.

• Axios, “Exclusive: Zuckerberg launches Meta Small Business”, March 25, 2026. This is the exclusive report that sparked today’s newsletter.

• Meta Investor Relations, “Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results”, January 28, 2026. This is the source for the key figures — $201.0 billion in 2025 annual revenue, 3.58 billion DAP, and more.

• Meta, “Dina Powell McCormick Joins Meta as President and Vice Chairman”, January 12, 2026. This gives you Dina Powell McCormick’s background and her role at the company.

• CNBC, “OpenAI’s first crack at online shopping stumbled. It’s preparing for the next wave”, March 20, 2026. A solid rundown of the agentic commerce race among OpenAI, Google, and Shopify.

• Axios, “Zuckerberg says AI will dramatically change how Meta employees work in 2026”, January 29, 2026. This covers the company’s own account of how AI is being used internally at Meta and its productivity claims.

• Marketing Dive, “Meta streamlines AI use for brands with new business agent, creative tools”, October 2, 2025. This helps make sense of Meta’s AI tooling strategy for SMBs, including Business AI and the expansion of Advantage+ tools.

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.

Footnotes

1. Share of ad revenue: of Meta’s total 2025 revenue of $200.966 billion, ad revenue came to $196.175 billion — about 97.6%. The remainder covers all other revenue from Reality Labs and the apps business. ↩

2. ARPU (Average Revenue Per User): the average revenue generated per user over a given period. Calculating spend per advertiser requires using the number of advertisers as the denominator, so this figure shouldn’t be conflated with platform user metrics. ↩

3. Agentic commerce: refers to AI handling parts of the commerce process — product search, comparison, ordering, and so on. The actual scope of what AI can do, and what payment authority it holds, varies by service. ↩