Meta’s next big AI bet is enterprise; its biggest hurdle may be trust

Meta is once again repositioning itself to target the enterprise market.

This week, the company announced the Meta Enterprise Platform, which it says will evolve its AI stack into products and services that enterprises can deploy into operations, rather than just using them for advertising and social media campaigns.

While the company provided few details about the offering, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the platform “the next major pillar” of its business, saying it will feature a connected suite of products including Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, and Muse Code.

MongoDB’s Chirantan “CJ” Desai will step in as chief enterprise platform officer to lead the effort.

The question is whether this endeavor, once fully launched, will be more lasting than Meta’s previous attempts in the enterprise.

“The issue of trust remains,” said Armaan Sandhu, research analyst in the AI practice at Info-Tech Research Group.

The shutdown of previous products like Workplace and Horizon Workrooms indicate that Meta tends to “abandon the enterprise products as soon as its vision of the future changes,” he said. “Companies will therefore require hard evidence that Meta will stick to its future plans and continue investing in their development.”

Meta’s growing AI ambitions

Meta has been working to reorganize its AI efforts since founding its Meta Superintelligence Lab in 2025. Muse Spark was the first new model to come out of that initiative; launched in April 2026, the agent supports multimodal inputs, multiple reasoning modes, and can spin up sub-agents in parallel to handle more complex tasks.

Next, Meta Business Agent, launched in June, directly targets enterprises, providing them with AI assistants to automate customer interactions, support sales, and drive leads across platforms including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The company followed that up with Muse Agent, an autonomous business and personal agent that can handle multi-step background tasks.

Muse Code is designed to handle complex software workflows across large codebases, while Muse API gives developers direct access to the Muse AI stack.

Abandoned efforts

However, Meta has so far struggled to gain a strong foothold in the enterprise market, and in some cases has abandoned previous attempts after they failed to take off.

For instance, Workplace, launched in 2016, supported communication and information sharing across organizations, but Meta announced in 2024 that the service would be discontinued, even as it reported millions of users. After a 10-year run, Workplace officially shut down in May 2026.

Then there are the company’s virtual reality efforts, including Horizon Workrooms, a collaboration app used with Quest headsets. It was offered for five years before being retired in February 2026.

Different positioning

But the company is positioning Meta Enterprise Platform differently; it will play on strengths that “few other companies have” and leverage its experience connecting millions of businesses and customers, Zuckerberg said, touting the company’s “advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses.”

However, noted Info-Tech’s Sandhu, Meta’s key advantage is not its technology; rivals such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce also offer capable models and agents. Its differentiator is that it owns the platforms where users familiarize themselves with brands, interact with businesses, and make purchases. Meta can therefore link advertising, customer discovery, messaging, service, and commerce through AI agents running across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

“Few rival companies can boast of such an effective combination of AI and access to customer channels,” Sandhu said.

Enterprise appeal may not be there

Still, Meta has challenges to overcome as it seeks to compete with well-entrenched tech giants and move beyond its consumer market origins.

Said independent technology analyst Carmi Levy, “It’s difficult to understand the appeal to enterprises, as Meta has never been known as a significant player in the enterprise market.”

Its data stewardship track record is also “somewhat checkered,” he pointed out, citing the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal that Meta is now answering for, as well as a number of other high-profile data stewardship and privacy cases in the US and UK.

He contended that the company’s core competency revolves around harvesting data to fuel growth, hardly a desirable trait in the enterprise space. Workplace “never quite realized its early promise,” and it’s unclear whether the Meta Enterprise Platform will suffer the same fate.

“Time and again, Meta’s behavior betrays its inability to craft the kind of iron-clad enterprise-grade infrastructure and organizational competency that corporate decision makers value,” he said, noting that even if its offerings were years ahead of the competition, these trust issues should give buyers pause.

In addition, Meta Enterprise Platform loosely ties together a host of offerings originally released into the mass consumer market, yet positions Muse as the pillar of its future enterprise strategy, he pointed out. If anything, Muse’s “early teething troubles,” including privacy violations and serious zero-day vulnerabilities, should be the only warning enterprise buyers need.

If Meta did manage to turn a consumer-architected collection of offerings into something somewhat more enterprise-ready, its “indifferent level of commitment” to earlier enterprise offerings raises the question of whether it intends to support such a platform well into the future. “If the commitment isn’t there, neither is the trust,” Levy added.

However, if enterprises do decide to evaluate the product, Sandhu advised that they pay attention to pricing, integration with other systems, and technical features. And initially, they should choose a narrow field of application, “with the goal of maximum benefit without making this technology a company’s key system.”