<body><p>STORY: Shares of Meta rose more than 3% in morning trading on Wednesday, after the social media giant unveiled an AI agent designed to help businesses carry out day-to-day operations.</p><p>The move marks Meta's latest push into the fast-growing enterprise AI market.</p><p>Mark Zuckerberg's company said the new product expands on existing business messaging services by enabling "agentic" capabilities in which the assistant can, for example, book calendar appointments and close sales on behalf of businesses.</p><p>It said more than 1 million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of such agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. The new version will be added to Instagram as well.</p><p>The move hints at Meta's ambitions to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market for enterprise applications of its AI tools, leveraging the reach of its WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps.</p><p>The company is also launching a broader "Business Agent Platform" aimed at giving businesses the tools to build custom AI agents to help them manage their operations elsewhere.</p><p>That platform is connected to hundreds of non-Meta systems, including Shopify.</p></body>
