The news: Meta is trying to accelerate adoption of its AI with an enterprise AI sales organization, per The Information, which cited a person familiar with the matter and Meta job postings it reviewed. Meta’s sales team is specifically focused on selling AI tools to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

On Meta’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wants to have a “business network of Muse agents,” and that small businesses can benefit from using Muse to automate time-consuming operations. The company stated it will spend between $135 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, much of which will go to AI.

The social media giant is also pursuing partnerships with consulting firms such as Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM to help attract corporate customers, a tactic that competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic have employed. Working with those firms can make AI deployment quicker and less dependent on Meta’s own engineers.

Zooming out: Some retailers and major companies have hesitated to use Meta’s AI products, including Amazon and Booking.com. Those doubts in part stemmed from concerns about control over how AI agents interact with customers, whether they trust Meta to have access to necessary data on users and operations, and having their own competing AI products, per The Information.

Meta ultimately discontinued its efforts to appeal to large retailers, sources said, and has found more promising adoption through WhatsApp and Messenger, including with companies like Flipkart. This may be due to the easier pitch of getting enterprises to use Meta AI tools on Meta-owned platforms where data is already being shared.

Brands want automated customer service and commerce, but they may not necessarily want Meta mediating every facet of customer relationships. That means brand control could become a more important competitive factor in enterprise AI adoption, as businesses seek authority over agents’ behavior, brand voice, data access, and human escalation abilities.

Implications for marketers: Meta’s challenges in persuading enterprises to deploy its agents demonstrate how brands may be grappling with ceding ownership of business data and customer experiences and relationships to AI systems.

Popular AI providers have their own pros and cons, and marketers need to identify which platforms best suit their needs, whether that’s Meta for customer interactions already happening on messaging platforms, or providers like OpenAI and Anthropic that can operate across other sites, apps, and customer channels.

Monitor how flexible systems are and where AI tools integrate with workflows, because being dependent on a single AI ecosystem could cause problems as the technology evolves and different players grow.

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