Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says artificial intelligence will eventually become the “ultimate business results machine,” projecting a future where small businesses can go without creative and marketing agencies — instead entrusting Meta AI to create and deliver full advertising campaigns.

His prediction came in a surprisingly candid and wide-reaching conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison, in which Zuckerberg bristled against long-time competitors Apple and Google and downplayed the threat of an AI “bubble”.

Speaking at payment technology giant Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg told Collison that artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the advertising market, where Meta makes the bulk of its revenue.

Compared to Meta’s traditional ad targeting systems, where brands build their own campaign and target their ads to specific demographics, Zuckerberg suggested Meta of the future could bring that creative and strategic work fully in-house.

“The basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is: ‘I want to get these customers to do this thing, I want to sell these things,’” said Zuckerberg

Meta could then ask businesses how much they are willing to spend, and then use agentic AI to “just deliver as many results as we can.”

This could change how small businesses undertake digital marketing campaigns, eliminating the need for third-party creative and marketing consultants, he continued.

“It will be possible in the future that you’re running a small business, or maybe a larger one, you wouldn’t have to start off with a creative.

“Maybe you can, maybe you’ll get better results, but you could just come with a goal and we’ll just kind of deliver results

“So that’s cool, and I think it’s going to pretty fundamentally change what advertising is.”

While the projection could crush small advertising and marketing consultancies if it came to fruition, Zuckerberg was bullish on how this form of AI could empower emerging businesses and startups.

“We’re just getting to the point where the AI can do [marketing] better than the average people who are doing that,” he said.

“Which is great, because it means companies can get started more easily.”

During the 45-minute discussion, Collison steered Zuckerberg towards the challenges facing Meta due to Google and Apple, both of which manufacture the smartphones where the bulk of Meta’s users access Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

“Tim [Cook] has had a bad week, I’m not going to pile on,” Zuckerberg said, seemingly referring to a recent US court decision taking Apple to task for collecting fees for app transactions made outside of its App Store.

“Sundar [Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet] is cool,” the Meta CEO added.

“But it’s complicated delivering services through your competitors.

On the prospect that AI company valuations have skyrocketed without enough tangible evidence of success, Zuckerberg said an AI “bubble” may still be worth it, even if some companies falter in the medium term.

“Even if it is a bubble, and it takes even longer to build out, that’s not necessarily the end of the world,” he said.

“Although it will be expensive for some other people — when you’re spending 65 to $70 billion in capex a year, you’d like it to count for something.”

“But I think the main question is, ‘Is this going to be a kind of five to 10 year thing?’

“And in some ways, [AI] probably will get built into every enterprise workflow.”

The author attended the event in San Francisco as a guest of Stripe.

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