Zuckerberg Tells Meta Staff the AI Agent Hype Is Still Loading 🤖

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday that the company's progress on AI agents has not accelerated as quickly as anticipated over the past four months, according to Reuters, which reviewed a recording of the meeting. "The trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," Zuckerberg said, adding that the bet on agent adoption has not "come to fruition yet." He told staff that executives launched an aggressive push into agentic infrastructure in January in part out of concern that Meta was not moving "fast enough."

Zuckerberg nonetheless said he expects Meta's AI investments to begin paying off within the next three to six months. In May, the company cut roughly 10% of its workforce and reassigned about 7,000 employees to AI-focused teams, a restructuring he acknowledged was not as clean as it could have been, with executives miscalculating the timing. On Thursday, Meta separately expanded its Meta Business Agent globally across Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, positioning the tool to respond to customer inquiries, make product recommendations and close sales without human intervention. Zuckerberg also disclosed in March that he is building a personal AI agent to assist with decision-making as CEO.

The remarks carry weight beyond Meta. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire are among the executives who have predicted that autonomous AI agents will become the dominant users of blockchain-based payments in the coming years. Several integrations have followed: in May, Amazon Web Services incorporated Coinbase's x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling agents to transact in USDC (USDC), and in April, crypto wallet startup Oobit introduced a Visa-supported virtual card that lets AI agents make online purchases in USDt (USDT) on behalf of businesses. Crypto exchange OKX has also launched an AI marketplace targeting the autonomous agent economy.

Data from Artemis, however, indicates that adoption remains limited. Only $2 million in trading volume has been facilitated through the x402 protocol over the past 30 days, underscoring the gap between the industry's agent-driven payment ambitions and current on-chain activity.