Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is in the middle of a sweeping transformation that touches every part of how these apps look, work, and make money. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the centre of all of it.
The social media conglomerate is rebuilding its products from the ground up, replacing the old model of a user-curated social feed with an active, AI-driven experience that generates content, answers questions, runs advertising, and charges users for premium features.
In Q1 2026, the company reported $56.3 billion in revenue, up 33% from the same period a year earlier, while committing to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on the infrastructure needed to power all of this.
Making it easier to create
The company has simplified the Facebook interface and added AI features that do much of the creative work for users. Static profile pictures can now be animated. Text posts can have animated backgrounds applied automatically. Old photos can be restyled using Meta’s own AI image tools. For users in the European Union (EU) on Android 15 devices, Facebook Messenger now supports conversational image editing and personalised chat themes.
For video creators, Meta has built a dedicated application called Edits, which connects directly to Facebook and Instagram Reels. The feature gives creators a professional editing timeline, teleprompter tools, and automated title cards. It also uses Meta’s Segment Anything Model 3, an advanced AI system, to apply visual effects to moving objects in real time, blur backgrounds automatically, and tag outfits as they appear on screen. The results have been significant: by early 2026, nearly 10% of daily Reels views across Meta’s platforms were produced using Edits.
Another feature called Live Translate now provides real-time audio dubbing across a wide range of languages. This removes the language barrier for international content, allowing a creator in one country to reach audiences in another without any additional effort.
Turning Facebook into a search engine
In June 2026, Meta launched a feature called AI Mode inside Facebook’s main search bar in the United States. This is perhaps the most strategically significant change Meta has made to the platform in years. Rather than searching the web for articles and links, AI Mode searches Facebook itself, pulling answers from public Groups, Reels, and Marketplace listings, and presenting them as a direct conversational response.
The logic behind this is straightforward. When someone wants to know which restaurant in their neighbourhood is actually good, or which brand of pushchair other parents recommend, they are better served by the opinions of real people who have used these things than by polished articles written for search engine rankings. Meta’s vast archive of community discussions, built up over two decades, becomes the raw material for a search engine grounded in lived experience.
The risks are real, however. Public social media posts are not verified, and the AI system has no reliable way to distinguish accurate advice from rumour or outdated information. Meta has also faced criticism for not providing users with a clear way to opt out of having their public posts used to train and power this system, or for explaining what happens to posts that are later changed from public to private.
The advertising overhaul
Meta’s core business is advertising, and the company has rebuilt that engine almost entirely around machine learning. Two systems sit at the heart of the new approach. The first is called Andromeda, which completed its global rollout in October 2025.
Andromeda handles the first stage of matching an advertisement to a user. Instead of relying on age brackets and interest categories selected by advertisers, Andromeda reads the ad itself, analysing its visuals, pacing, tone, and structure, and matches it to users whose recent behaviour suggests they are likely to respond to it. This represents a 10,000-fold increase in model complexity over previous systems. As a result, the old practice of defining target audiences by demographic categories has largely been replaced by creative quality as the primary driver of ad performance.
The second system is called GEM, the Generative Ads Recommendation model. GEM operates as Meta’s central advertising intelligence layer, trained on thousands of GPUs, and designed to share performance insights across all of Meta’s surfaces simultaneously.
Instagram Reels engagement data, for example, now informs Facebook Feed ad predictions. All of this runs under a unified framework called Lattice, which consolidated around 100 separate ad models into a single system.
These tools are packaged for businesses through a product suite called Advantage+, which now manages more than $60 billion in annualised advertising spend. Campaigns run through Advantage+ handle targeting, creative variations, placement, and budget allocation automatically.
The average return on ad spend through these automated campaigns is $4.52 for every dollar invested, which is 22% higher than manually managed campaigns. Automated campaigns also deliver leads at 10% to 14% lower cost, and show a 32% improvement in cost per action when campaigns are consolidated.
For businesses managing their Facebook Pages, Meta is promoting Manus AI as a digital work partner capable of handling customer enquiries, booking appointments, qualifying leads, and providing round-the-clock service through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. These systems connect with platforms like Shopify and Zendesk, and Meta plans to charge for them through subscriptions and usage-based pricing.
Charging users for the first time
Alongside its advertising business, Meta is building an entirely new revenue stream: consumer subscriptions. The company has launched a programme called Meta One, currently being tested in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia, which offers tiered paid access to advanced AI features and platform benefits.
The tiers range from $2.99 per month for WhatsApp Plus, which adds custom themes and stickers, up to $49.99 per month for Meta One Advanced, aimed at established creators and brands, and including search boosts, content protection, and access to human support staff.
In between, Meta One Plus at $7.99 per month offers high-volume image and video generation. Meta One Essential at $14.99 includes verification badges and creator analytics. Meta One Premium at $19.99 unlocks extended AI reasoning tools, and premium media generation.
The strategy is to keep basic AI features free while placing limits on heavy usage, pushing power users toward paid tiers. This puts Meta in direct competition with standalone AI platforms like OpenAI and Google, but with the advantage of an existing relationship with billions of users who already have these apps installed.
The costs of moving fast
Meta’s aggressive push into AI has created problems it has not yet solved. The most widespread is the proliferation of what has been labelled AI slop: low-quality, algorithmically generated content produced at high volume to attract attention, and advertising revenue.
This includes AI-generated images designed to provoke emotional reactions, deepfake celebrity endorsements, and automated accounts that post on schedule without any human involvement. Slop was named ‘Word of the Year for 2025’ by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.
Recommendation algorithms prioritise content that generates high engagement, and automated accounts are specifically built to produce that kind of content, which means human-created content can struggle to compete for visibility. AI-generated misinformation has also spread into more dangerous territory, with unverified guides on topics like foraging and financial advice appearing across platforms.
Meta’s own internal safety evaluations have flagged concerns. The company’s preparedness report for its Muse Spark model found elevated risks in chemical, biological, and cybersecurity categories before safety mitigations were applied.
CFO Susan Li’s revised capital expenditure guidance of $125 billion to $145 billion for 2026 caused a short-term fall in the company’s share price after earnings, despite the strong revenue results. Analysts remain broadly positive, viewing the spending as essential groundwork for operating AI systems at the scale Meta requires, including a 168-megawatt data centre leased from Reliance Industries in India to support global AI workloads.
Meta is building a closed ecosystem where AI will be generating content, curating feeds, answering questions, running advertising, and charging users for enhanced access. Whether it can manage the risks that come with that ambition is the central question facing the company over the next several years.