$30B AI Opportunity: Will It Power Meta’s Next Surge?

Key Points

• Mark Zuckerberg recently highlighted Meta's five key AI opportunities, making a research report from one Wall Street analyst much more interesting.
• This analyst sees a possible +$30 billion emerging opportunity for Meta and strong upside in shares.
• Meta has the potential to increase the monetization of its WhatsApp platform. It has over 3 billion users but now generates less than $2 billion in revenue.

Magnificent Seven giant Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META has been no stranger to Wall Street analyst upgrades lately. After the company’s last earnings report, nearly 20 analysts tracked by MarketBeat increased their price targets on the stock.

More recently, analysts at Wolfe Research issued a substantial price target update on Meta of $750. This implies a significant potential upside in Meta shares of nearly 18% from its May 20 closing price.

Mark Zuckerberg recently shared five key AI growth opportunities for the company. This makes an earlier piece of Wolfe's research particularly relevant. Wolfe has referenced the huge growth potential of one opportunity that Zuckerberg mentioned: business messaging. It sees business messaging as a possible $30–$40 billion opportunity for Meta.

Zuckerberg's recent comments suggest that business messaging might help Meta hit Wolfe's $750 12-month price target. This analysis will break down Meta’s ambitions in business messaging and show just how powerful they could be for the tech stock.

Over a Third of the World Population Is Using WhatsApp

Aside from Facebook and Instagram, Meta also owns possibly the world’s most-used direct messaging app, WhatsApp. In Meta’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Zuckerberg stated that WhatsApp has over 3 billion monthly active users. That is equal to around 38% of the world’s population of 8 billion. Zuckerberg also said that more than one billion people use Facebook Messenger every month.

Additionally, users send just as many messages on Instagram each day as they do on Messenger. He summed up this massive user count and activity data by saying, “So, Business messaging should be the next pillar of our business."

It looks like Meta is gearing up to start aggressively monetizing its huge messaging user base. This could kick off the path toward Meta executing on Wolfe’s massive total addressable market revenue estimates in this space. Wolfe estimates that Meta is only generating around $1.5 billion to $2 billion in annual revenue from WhatsApp. That lines up with Meta’s latest earnings. Meta's Other Family of Apps Revenue, which houses WhatsApp, generated around $1.8 billion over the last 12 months. It also generated $510 million in revenue last quarter, growing by 34% from a year ago.

Wolfe’s Estimates Indicate a Huge Opportunity for Meta

Although the timeline around which Wolfe sees Meta achieving $30–$40 billion in business messaging revenue is uncertain, it could clearly be a huge growth driver for Meta. At the midpoints of Wolfe’s estimates, this would mean a 20x increase in Meta’s business messaging revenue. Additionally, $35 billion in business messaging revenue would be equal to over 20% of the $170 billion that Meta generated in the last 12 months.

Meta intends to increase the monetization of business messaging using AI. Zuckerberg envisions every company using an "AI business agent." This agent handles customer service and runs sales campaigns through direct messaging. Meta would then presumably charge companies to do this through its messaging apps.

Meta has already seen companies in Thailand and Vietnam using its messaging apps to aid their business. However, they use humans to do so because the cost of labor in those countries is low. The company believes that the use of AI agents can make doing this profitable in developed countries.

However, Meta’s focus on monetizing AI in developed countries is somewhat curious. Only around 100 million of WhatsApp’s 3 billion monthly active users are in the United States. Additionally, data shows that most WhatsApp users are in emerging economies. If these economies already have low labor costs, will AI agents really change the adoption of business messaging? While they might not make a difference in whether business messaging is profitable overall in these countries, there is a solid chance they could raise profitability, thus increasing adoption. This remains to be seen, as Meta is currently testing these AI features. Additionally, an amount of 100 million users is still around 30% of the population in the United States, meaning there is a big opportunity at home as well.

With Proper Execution, Business Messaging Could Be Meta’s Next Big Hit

Overall, Meta’s business messaging ambitions should be a key area of focus for investors going forward. However, it seems reasonable to pump the brakes on Wolfe’s huge forecasts in this area until more tangible results for Meta’s AI agents surface. If successful, business messaging represents a huge possible growth opportunity for one of the most dominant technology names in the world.