First, Mark Zuckerberg copied Snapchat Stories. Then he took its filters. Is he really copying Snapchat again?
The Meta CEO is planning to unleash an assortment of chatbots with different personalities on both Facebook and Instagram, the Financial Times reported earlier this week. The bots, which could be available as early as September, will apparently engage in human-like conversations to entertain users. If that sounds familiar, it's because idea is eerily similar to Snapchat's My AI chatbot.
While My AI, which Snap launched in February, has only one personality as opposed to the collection of bots and "personas" envisioned by Meta, the move appears to be classic Zuck.
“Zuckerberg has a history of finding a competitive product, replicating it, and making it better,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. Meta has used this playbook to reproduce a variety of its competitors’ features over the years, including Reels from TikTok, Candid Stories from BeReal, and Threads from Twitter. “It’s proven time and time again to work,” Woods told Fortune.
To be sure, Zuckerberg has a well-established track record of interest in chatbots. Facebook tried launching a virtual assistant called M in 2015, and WhatsApp has for years encouraged businesses to create chatbots to automate customer service. So it's not as if Snapchat's My AI opened Zuckerberg's eyes to something entirely novel to him. But now, more than ever, a new generation of A.I. chatbots like My AI provide a clever solution to a problem facing Snap and Meta by delivering something they both desperately need: data.
Snap and Meta generate the majority of their revenues from selling finely targeted advertisements—the more data they have on a user, the more money they can charge companies for delivering targeted ads. While Meta is a much larger and more profitable company than Snap, it is facing similar issues regarding its ad-targeting capabilities. In 2021, Apple began requiring apps downloaded through its App Store to obtain permission from users before it could track their activity and collect their data. The change limited the ability of companies to provide targeted ads. Meta cited the policy update as a cause of its first-ever revenue decline in July 2022, and Zuckerberg criticized Apple's move just last week, condemning the "massive value destruction for small businesses because of the rules that were set by another platform."
For companies like Snap and Meta that need new ways to collect first-party user data, chatbots have a lot of promise.
Data collected from conversations with My AI helps Snap target more relevant ads to users, which the company can charge more for. In the six months since Snap launched My AI, more than 150 million people have engaged with the chatbot, representing one-fifth of Snap’s global monthly users, according to Snap’s latest quarterly letter to investors. The users sent more than 10 billion messages, usually asking for product recommendations and exploring their interests, a Snap spokesperson told Fortune via email. In June, My AI had 8 million conversations about pizza, 12 million about cosmetic recommendations, and 65 million about cars, they said.
Snap is also testing sponsored links through My AI, and according to Snap’s July letter to investors, My AI is a key part of the company's strategy to diversify its revenue. It's clearly still a work in progress. Snap's $1.07 billion in Q2 revenue declined 4% from the same period last year. Its stock is a fraction of its 2021 peak.
The value of the Meta magic
Meta could see a quicker payoff thanks to its bigger audience, said Woods of Freedom Capital Markets. More than 3 billion people now use one of Meta's apps every day. The advantage of that scale was demonstrated last month when the company launched Threads, a Twitter competitor. In a matter of five days, Threads amassed 100 million users. It took ChatGPT two months to reach that number (though Threads engagement has cooled off significantly since its launch).
And Meta is skilled at monetizing products and features on its various platforms. The company had sales of $117 billion in 2022, placing it in the top 100 companies by revenue in the world, according to Fortune’s Global 500 list. Meta could follow Snap’s lead by offering sponsored links through its chatbot and using data from conversations to target ads.
While Facebook’s and Instagram’s interfaces are already easy to use, Woods said, the integration of generative A.I. could make them even easier. A chatbot might act as a virtual assistant, posting photos and tagging accounts when a user tells it to. By expediting this process, a user could spend more time browsing the app, he said.
A Meta spokesperson wouldn’t confirm the report of the forthcoming bots to Fortune, but Zuckerberg hinted at the generative A.I. technologies the company is working on during its Q2 earnings call last week. "We don't think that there's going to be one single A.I. that people interact with," Zuckerberg said.
An army of chatbots could also help Meta in its competition with TikTok. Meta has had to work harder for users' attention since the 2017 launch of TikTok in the U.S. and the trend of short-form video, which Zuckerberg admits he missed. Adults in the U.S. spend twice as much time on TikTok than on Facebook and Instagram individually, according to a 2023 Insider Intelligence report. TikTok has 150 million U.S. users.
"You can imagine lots of ways A.I. could help people connect and express themselves in our apps," Zuckerberg said on Meta's recent earnings call. Among the examples: "creative tools that make it easier and more fun to share content; agents that act as assistants, coaches, or that can help you interact with businesses and creators and more."
