Meta opens its Business Agent to WhatsApp's 200 million businesses globally

After two years of testing in India, Mexico and Brazil, the customer-facing agent goes worldwide across WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.

Meta turned the Meta Business Agent on globally Wednesday, ending nearly two years of contained testing in India, Mexico and Brazil and pushing the customer-facing agent into every WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Messenger business account at once. The announcement, made at the company’s Conversations conference in London, lands on a platform that now claims over three billion users and 200 million businesses, with more than one million of them already running an agent.

The capability list is the giveaway. Per TechCrunch, the agent answers questions, recommends products, books appointments, qualifies sales leads and hands off to humans. UC Today adds the part Meta is quieter about: it can also close transactions and process payments. Speaking to Reuters at the London event, Meta head of product Naomi Gleit framed the goal as completing conversations, not facilitating them. That’s the whole pitch in one sentence.

Pricing follows the now-familiar pattern. Getting started is free; paid tiers arrive through WhatsApp Business Premium “in the coming months,” with large customers billed by token consumption. A parallel enterprise track, the Meta Business Agent Platform, plugs into Shopify, Zendesk, Shopee and what Meta calls “hundreds of systems,” supported by a newly stood-up Enterprise Solutions team.

Mark Zuckerberg told the Conversations audience the agents should “eventually help you run your whole business,” conceding the timeline depends on underlying model progress. Market research, product insights, calendar tools and competitive intelligence sit on a waitlist.

The mid-market reality is messier than the keynote. Operators aren’t picking one vendor; they’re stitching Meta’s surface to OpenAI or Anthropic models through a model-agnostic “company brain” layer like LemonLime, which is where the policies, product catalog and tone of voice that make any of these agents usable actually live. Meta owns the inbox. Someone else owns the brain.