Meta is making a play for Main Street.
The tech giant is launching Meta Small Business, an aggressive initiative offering the 250 million small and medium businesses that use its platform a suite of new AI tools. The company is betting that smaller enterprises will drive its next growth phase as its core ad business faces mounting legal heat.
“Small businesses have always been the largest category of our business,” Zuckerberg wrote in an internal post on Wednesday that was reviewed by NYNext. “In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this.”
The initiative will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and head of product Naomi Gleit, reporting directly to Zuckerberg. The pair will build on a base of over 300 million small businesses already running on Meta’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“I’ve seen firsthand that small business owners don’t fear new challenges — they’re resourceful, creative, and relentlessly solution-oriented,” Powell McCormick told NYNext.
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The play comes amid an intensifying AI arms race, with tech titans scrambling to stake out territory as the advertising and marketing landscape changes and consumers embrace products like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The push taps into an untapped AI market: Small and medium businesses (SMBs) spend over $400 billion annually on digital marketing and business tools. While larger enterprise clients have embraced sophisticated AI solutions, smaller operations have been less of a focus, despite representing the vast majority of global businesses.
Meta is well-positioned in this space: many small businesses are already using Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for advertising and promotion.
Rather than asking SMBs to learn new AI platforms, Meta is unveiling tools that are integrated into the platforms they already use and will automate the most time-consuming tasks, such as generating personalized responses to customer inquiries across Facebook and Instagram and creating social media content.
This is the second multifunctional division to be announced this year at Meta. In January, Zuckerberg unveiled Meta Compute, the company’s $600 billion investment in American infrastructure and jobs. The moves show that Zuck is taking a hands-on approach to the company’s AI infrastructure strategy to pioneer its next phase of growth.
The company faces competition from Google Business tools and Microsoft 365’s AI integration. While those platforms focus on productivity software, Meta’s advantage lies in customer-facing marketing tools where SMBs spend most of their digital energy — and budget.
This product comes as Meta faces mounting regulatory scrutiny that could threaten its advertising business. Just yesterday, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company willfully violated state consumer protection laws by failing to protect children from predators on Facebook and Instagram.
The landmark verdict, which Meta plans to appeal, adds to ongoing antitrust investigations across multiple jurisdictions, privacy violation penalties, and content moderation lawsuits that have created uncertainty around the company’s traditional revenue streams, pushing the company to diversify.
The small business focus comes as Meta has cut hundreds of jobs in its Metaverse division, signaling a strategic shift toward AI applications with clearer revenue potential.
“We are empowering the millions of entrepreneurs already using our platforms with product solutions and tools to help them grow,” Powell McCormick told NYNext.
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