Meta has begun a global rollout of its business AI agents, expanding the effort beyond WhatsApp to Messenger and Instagram and positioning the company more directly against Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. Introduced at Meta’s Conversations conference in London, the new agent is designed to handle customer questions in a company’s brand voice, answer routine queries, screen sales leads and hand more complex issues to human staff. In some cases it can also complete actions such as processing payments, bookings and orders rather than relying on prewritten chatbot scripts. More than 1 million businesses already use older chatbots on WhatsApp and Messenger, and Meta is offering the new Business Agent free at launch, with paid tiers planned later. The company is also introducing a Business Agent Platform that lets companies build custom AI agents for tasks beyond Meta’s own apps, with connections to third-party tools including Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee as well as enterprise controls and analytics. Meta said the service launches globally today for businesses of any size, though it did not give a timeline for paid subscriptions.