Key facts
- Meta's Chief Data Officer, Schultz, believes agentic commerce is the "next tier of business".
- Meta has over a million weekly active businesses using its agents, primarily on WhatsApp.
- Schultz predicts a future without physical wallets, with digital payments and stablecoins being central.
- He cited WeChat and Line as examples of successful large-scale conversational commerce.
- Meta aims to be the interface layer for commerce, with payment settlement occurring underneath.
- Schultz stated Meta would utilize decentralized identity systems if they offered scale and reliability.
Meta's Chief Data Officer, Schultz, has articulated a vision for agentic commerce, describing it as an inevitable evolution for businesses and potentially the "next tier of business" for the company. He explained that Meta is actively building business agents, noting that over a million businesses are already using them weekly, a significant increase since the start of the year.
Schultz illustrated the potential of these agents with a simple example: coordinating a child's birthday party, which involves booking times, checking calendars, finding venues, and communicating with other parents' agents, all within a messaging app like WhatsApp. He suggested that if agents can manage low-stakes logistics, they can scale to handle more complex tasks such as supply chain negotiations and financial settlements.
Central to this vision of agentic commerce is the role of stablecoins in the payment layer. Schultz anticipates a future where physical wallets become obsolete, replaced by digital payments. He pointed to the success of WeChat's payment model and Line's commerce infrastructure in Asia as proof that large-scale conversational commerce is viable. He contrasted this with the perceived backwardness of the U.S. reliance on iMessage for such functions.
Schultz acknowledged Meta's past regulatory hurdles with its Libra and Diem projects, stating that the company's current strategy in financial services is focused on partnerships rather than proprietary currency. Meta aims to provide the interface and messaging layer, while payment settlement occurs through third-party stablecoins. This approach is seen as a response to the changed regulatory landscape since Libra, which faced significant scrutiny from U.S. regulators.
When discussing decentralization and proof-of-humanity systems, Schultz expressed that a decentralized verification service would be highly useful for Meta, provided it could be integrated reliably and at scale. He noted that while many smart people have attempted to create such systems, none have yet reached the necessary penetration. He emphasized the need for a verification layer to ensure agents represent the businesses they claim to, a challenge that decentralized identity solutions could potentially solve.