• Generative AI technology has become Meta's top priority, directly impacting the company's business and potentially paving the road to future revenue opportunities.
• Meta's all-encompassing approach to AI has led analysts to predict more success in 2025.
• Meta in April said it would raise its spending levels this year by as much as $10 billion to support infrastructure investments for its AI strategy. Meta's stock price hit a record on Dec. 11.

"Aut Zuck Aut Nihil" spanned the front of Mark Zuckerberg's loose-fitting black shirt during his keynote at Meta's Connect event in September. 

The words, donned in all-caps and gray font, were a play on the Latin phrase "Aut Caesar Aut Nihil," which translates to "Either Caesar or nothing" or rather "All or nothing." It was a fitting phrase for a company that in 2024 put the full weight of its resources behind its artificial intelligence strategy. 

Meta in April said it would raise its spending levels in 2024 by as much as $10 billion to support infrastructure investments for its AI efforts. Although the announcement sent shares plunging as much as 19% that evening, investors have come around to the company's costly AI ambitions. Meta's stock price hit a record on Dec. 11, and it's up nearly 70% year to date as of the market's close on Friday.

"It's clear that there are a lot of new opportunities to use new AI advances to accelerate our core business that should have strong ROI over the next few years, so I think we should invest more there," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts in October.

He noted AI's "positive impact on nearly all aspects of our work," highlighting how the technology was key to rebuilding the company's online advertising business that took a lashing from Apple's iOS privacy update in 2021. Additionally, he said AI underpins Meta's more nascent projects, such as its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and experimental Orion augmented reality headset that Zuckerberg believes could represent "the next computing platform."

Zuckerberg's comments about AI underscore how the technology has become Meta's top priority, directly impacting the company's business and potentially paving the way for future revenue opportunities. Unlike the company's more conventional services, like Instagram and Facebook, AI is an infrastructure technology that Zuckerberg wants hardwired into its various products, particularly as competitors like OpenAI continue to make inroads with consumers.

While OpenAI's GPT family of AI models help power apps like ChatGPT, Meta's family of Llama AI models feeds the company's newer generative AI features like the Meta AI digital assistant. That chatbot represents Zuckerberg's primary way to introduce generative AI technologies to its billions of users.

"Meta AI is on track to being the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of this year," Zuckerberg said at Connect. 

The company has been increasingly releasing new generative AI features for advertisers to continue improving the efficiency of its online advertising platform. And with the hiring last month of Clara Shih, who had been Salesforce's CEO of AI, to lead a new business AI group, Meta aims to build a more enterprise-focused unit in the new year.

Meta's all-encompassing approach to AI has led analysts to predict that Meta is positioned for more success in 2025.

Analysts at Jefferies chose Meta as one of generative AI's "winners" heading into 2025, writing in a Dec. 15 note that the company's massive user base represents "one of the richest surfaces to introduce Gen AI tools." Truist Securities analysts said in a note last week that the Meta AI digital assistant could challenge Google's search as "an answer engine for all kinds of queries" and that the social media company is likely to outperform in 2025, potentially benefiting from offering businesses more advanced customer service chatbots. 

"We believe META has a unique opportunity to introduce Gen AI tools to the almost 4B users & >200M businesses across its family of apps," the Jefferies analysts wrote.

Meta declined to comment for this article, but pointed to previous statistics and executive comments about AI.

Meta AI's expanding user base

Meta has been increasingly talking up the number of people who use Meta AI, with Zuckerberg saying in December that the digital assistant "now has nearly 600 million monthly actives."

He launched the Meta AI chatbot in 2023 to rival the generative AI chatbots of competitors, most notably OpenAI's ChatGPT. In April, the company brought it to the forefront of each of the apps in its empire by putting Meta AI in the search bars of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. 

But because the company doesn't offer a stand-alone Meta AI app, it's difficult to directly compare its usage to similar services like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, said David Curry, the data editor for insights firm Business of Apps.

When it comes to monthly active users, the most popular of these generative AI chatbot apps is ChatGPT by a wide margin, followed by Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and Perplexity, Curry said.

The Meta AI "standalone website gets less than 10 million views per month, putting it far below the major services (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc) and even lower than some mid-range players like Anthropic," Curry said, based on data he accessed via the Similarweb web-tracking service. 

Meta's finance chief, Susan Li, told analysts in July that India has become the company's "largest market for Meta AI usage." That usage has coincided with promising signs of retention and engagement on WhatsApp, Li added. 

Among those users is Sonny Ravan, a music producer in Pune, India. Ravan said he finds Meta AI, which he uses through WhatsApp, helpful for learning about the history of songs that he enjoys. He also uses it as a tool to learn about people in the music industry who he plans to work with or meet, describing it as great for preparation.

Sathish Thiyagarajan, 30, a technical support engineer for marketing tech firm GoX.AI, said he's increasingly using Meta AI as a search tool via WhatsApp, which he noted dominates the Indian market for mobile internet communications.

"While I'm talking with my family or my friends, if they're saying something to me and I have to search something, I'm not going to go to Google," said Thiyagarajan, of Chennai, India. "I'm just going to put the phone in the speaker mode, and I'll immediately search through Meta AI."

However, Thiyagarajan said he only uses Meta AI when he's on his phone. If he's at his computer, OpenAI's ChatGPT is his preferred AI chatbot.

Not everyone is a fan of Meta AI's bundling into WhatsApp's search functions. 

Jawhar Sircar, 72, a retired government official in Kolkata, India, called the Meta AI search feature in WhatsApp "quite a nuisance." That's because whenever a user pauses while typing out a name in the search-find box, the Meta AI technology quickly "picks up whatever has been typed" and generates what he describes as unnecessary search prompt suggestions.

As far as the popularity of Meta AI in India, Sircar said he thinks the feature is mostly used by companies, technologists and other professionals who "are getting hooked to AI" alongside the Indian government's continued investment in regional computing infrastructure.

"Professionals and companies have started using AI, but the general user has no need, at least not on the Meta platforms," Sircar wrote in an email.

Meta's AI strategy for advertisers

Advertising is still the key to revenue.

Meta said in December that over 1 million advertisers had used the company's GenAI tools to create more than 15 million ads in a single month.

"We estimate that businesses using image generation are seeing a +7% increase in conversions," Meta said at the time, regarding its image generation features.

While people may associate generative AI with the visually striking and sometimes surreal imagery derived from popular services like Dall-E or Midjourney, it's more likely that the average small business advertiser uses Meta's GenAI tools for more subtle tasks, said Stacy Reed, an online advertising and Facebook ads consultant. 

That includes using AI to create multiple versions of an ad's headline, auto-resizing the size of ads so they look appropriate within users' Instagram and Facebook apps, and repositioning certain images within the ads so that the promotions perform better, Reed said.

Advertisers that already write strong, creative copy can ask Meta's GenAI tools for "a little bit more" help, Reed said. 

"That's where you win with their AI tools," she said.

Reed said the many small advertisers she supports aren't associating the new features with AI. They "think that Meta is just enhancing the way you build ads," Reed said.

Celina Guerrero, an independent corporate sales and training consultant, said she uses Meta's GenAI tools to help with writing headlines for her ads, but she said she finds Meta's advertising interface to be confusing and constantly changing.

"It is visually overwhelming from a user experience," Guerrero said.

Ahead of a Facebook ad campaign planned for January, Guerrero said she is debating how to use Meta's GenAI tools for more in-depth tasks, like modifying her ad's entire in-line copy. 

"I don't want my copy to sound like ChatGPT," Guerrero said, referring to the sterile, run-of-the-mill AI-generated text that's proliferating the web. "I have two options: One, I don't use the variations, or two, I spend an inordinate amount of hours editing it."

Most big companies and advertising agencies are turning to more marketing-specific tools for their generative AI-based ad campaigns, said Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at Forrester. Those services are more robust than Meta's built-in AI ad tools, he said.

Still, the mere introduction of simple GenAI tools is beneficial to Meta considering it dominates the digital ads market along with Google. Meta's generative AI tools just have "to be good enough to squeeze out more investment" from advertisers, said Maurice Rahmey, CEO of performance marketing firm Disruptive Digital and a former Facebook customer manager.

"It's better for their business, even if it's just those small, incremental changes," Rahmey said "It's a business of scale."

What's next for Meta's enterprise play?

With Meta's hiring of Shih from Salesforce in November, some analysts say Meta could make an enterprise technology push with its Llama family of open-source AI models. 

Llama's advancements "represent a significant opportunity for businesses to drive more efficiencies and significantly improve the experiences they offer their customers," Meta monetization head John Hegeman said in a statement.

Shih, who was one of CNBC's 2024 changemakers, rejoined Salesforce in 2020 after previously working at the company from 2006 through 2009. As part of her most recent role at Salesforce, Shih helped oversee Einstein GPT for Service and Sales, a GenAI product intended for sales and customer support staff.

During her first stint at Salesforce, Shih created a business app that let users connect their Salesforce customer relationship software with their Facebook connections. In 2009, she wrote "The Facebook Era," a book intended for professionals to better understand how to use social networks for business.

Multiple former Meta AI and product leaders told CNBC that Shih's vast experience will be helpful considering the company has failed in previous attempts at building enterprise software. 

Meta announced in May that it plans to shut down Workplace, its business communications product, by 2026. And after buying enterprise startup Kustomer for about $1 billion in 2020, Meta spun it out in 2023 in a deal that was reportedly valued at $250 million.

The most logical step for Meta would be to create a larger business around WhatsApp, said Ralph Schackart, an internet equity analyst at investment bank William Blair. Specifically, WhatsApp could help businesses build customer-service chatbots using Meta's GenAI, Schackart said. 

"Longer term, this is going to evolve into customized sales agents, which is a $3 trillion-plus industry," Schackart said about Meta's WhatsApp business AI chatbot opportunity.

WATCH: If the U.S. bans TikTok, China could retaliate and target Tesla and Apple.