Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to convince investors of his prediction for the future, in which billions of people will have their own personal AI agents within the next five years. (Let’s hope the future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents, without triggering a new wave of climate disasters.)

“I think it’s extremely unlikely if you look five years from now, for example, whatever time period you want, that you won’t have billions of people with a personal agent who understands your goals and who is simply working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever domain you’re interested in,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.

He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships and home management.

“As we move toward a future where we all interact with multiple agents, I think WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces will become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.

Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person’s behalf rather than simply answering questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its Search overhaul, sparking an outcry from users who felt stuck by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude have skyrocketed as engineers fawn over assistant coding agent Claude Code.

However, compared to its competitors, Meta may not enjoy as much confidence from investors as it continues to pour cash into innovative projects that may or may not succeed: Meta shares fell nearly 10% after releasing this quarter’s earnings. Meta’s Reality Labs, the organization responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets and related software, lost about $4.6 billion this quarter, roughly in line with the losses the division has posted every quarter since 2021. That’s a cumulative total now of about $88 billion.

Meta’s AI spending is likely to increase further, which is more worrying at the moment. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, up from $8.55 billion in the same quarter last year. That’s a 91% year-over-year drop, exacerbated by the company’s investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.

“We think there will still be a significantly higher margin in selling intelligence versus selling computing directly, but we think there’s obviously a huge opportunity to sell computing as well,” Zuckerberg said.

Ultimately, he believes the personal agents Meta is developing will be “the foundation of our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years to come.”

So far, Meta Business Agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than one million businesses. It may be harder to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the path to the “billions” has to start somewhere—the enterprise can’t get there with enterprise agents alone.