The news: Meta announced a slate of AI-powered ad tech tools at Advertising Week New York, pushing automation and agentic AI deeper into ads and user offerings.

Updates include:

• AI-enabled audience discovery inside Detailed Targeting that lets advertisers and agencies surface relevant audiences using natural language prompts.
• Expanded genAI video tools for Advantage+ creative and Ads Creative Studio, including the ability to generate video from existing static assets.
• A new checkout experience that lets shoppers buy directly inside Meta Business Agent on Messenger through a partnership with Shopify. This is in testing now, with plans to expand to Meta AI and Muse.

Meta also added new capabilities to its Meta AI business assistant, including agentic control to generate creative, update targeting, and change budgets through chat prompts, as well as schedule tasks like recurring performance reports and alerts. It also features an import tool to upload strategy documents and brand voice guidelines.

What it means: The feature updates move Meta’s AI tools toward more autonomous execution while offering advertisers deeper control over how those systems represent and understand their brands.

For brands, turning Meta AI and Messenger into stronger checkout surfaces can shorten the social commerce journey while raising the importance of showing up in AI-driven shopping experiences. And the document and guideline import feature could help address worries about generic, off-brand outputs and increase trust among hesitant brands.

But there are caveats. Expanded self-service automation may require agencies to prove their value through strategy, cross-platform expertise, networking resources, and human creativity that AI can’t match.

Recommendations for marketers: Letting brands adjust budgets, targeting, optimization, and creative through chat prompts removes manual steps and democratizes campaign creation for leaner teams on Meta’s properties.

However, marketers should treat those productivity gains as an opportunity to move human attention toward deeper customer outreach, creative concepting, long-term strategy planning, and product development, instead of handing over all campaign decisions.

Check outputs for brand safety and alignment with brand voice rather than assuming AI will fully comprehend brand documents, and experiment with agentic tools on lower-risk campaigns first.

Dive deeper: Check out what else we learned at Advertising Week New York.

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