During Meta's latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that within the next five years, billions of people could rely on personal AI agents that independently complete tasks and work continuously in the background, evolving beyond today's chatbots. Meta is making these assistants a key focus of its long-term strategy, planning to integrate them across future products. The company's aggressive AI expansion weighed on finances, with free cash flow dropping 91 per cent year-on-year to $784 million in the second quarter. Meta also increased the lower end of its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $130 billion, and its shares declined by around 10 per cent following the earnings announcement. Zuckerberg said Meta sees greater long-term value in selling AI-powered services rather than simply renting computing resources. The company has introduced new AI models, including Muse Spark 1.1 and Muse Image, and expects WhatsApp and Instagram to play a larger role in delivering AI experiences, with WhatsApp already serving as the biggest platform for Meta AI. Alongside AI spending, Reality Labs recorded another multibillion-dollar quarterly loss, pushing the unit's cumulative operating losses beyond $80 billion since 2021. The company also incurred severance costs after laying off around 8,000 employees earlier this year.