Meta is pushing a new advertising vision that relies heavily on AI to transform its ad business. Speaking in an interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the company’s primary focus is on using AI to make advertising “go a lot better.”

Meta wants marketers to run campaigns across its platforms, with AI handling the creative, targeting, and measurement strategies. “We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect your bank account… you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic,” Zuckerberg said. Instead, Meta’s AI would take over the full process, from content generation to audience targeting to reporting outcomes.

Zuckerberg says the ad process from creatives to conversions will be automated

Zuckerberg believes that automating the ad process from strategy to delivery will redefine what advertising looks like. “I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising,” he said. The traditional model of planning a campaign, creating assets, choosing a target group, and measuring results might eventually be replaced by a simple prompt and a payment method.

The idea is that businesses won’t have to create ad copy, pick images, or even know their audience. Meta's AI will handle it all—starting with the creative (text, visuals, videos) generated automatically based on the advertiser's goal. That includes testing multiple variations of creatives at scale to find what works best.

In November last year, the company upgraded its ad recommendation system. The new system uses AI to recommend ads to users. Meta says it uses event-based features (EBFs) to track how users interact with ads in real-time. This allows the system to make recommendations, using techniques inspired by large language models.

Less manual work, more AI decisions

Zuckerberg noted that manual audience targeting is changing. In the past, advertisers would come to Meta with specific audience parameters such as demographics. Now, that’s changing. Meta is actively discouraging microtargeting. The company’s plan is for advertisers to tell Meta what outcome they want, and Meta will use AI to deliver it.

“In general, we’re going to get to a point where… you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic,” Zuckerberg said. “I think that’s going to be huge.”

Performance is the new creative

Zuckerberg called AI the “ultimate business agent,” managing every step of the advertising process—from content creation to performance measurement. Given the competition from Google’s Performance Max and AI-powered ad tools from OpenAI, Meta needs to push toward more AI capabilities to drive results that can be measured. 

The company is already on track in this regard. In Q1 2025, Meta reported strong ad revenues, driven largely by this AI-first shift. Zuckerberg said AI is already “generating better creative options” and helping advertisers achieve “measurable results at scale.” 

AI will also transform other areas beyond ads

Zuckerberg outlined other big product directions, including boosting user engagement with AI-driven content recommendations and building new AI products like the Meta AI assistant.

On the content side, Meta sees AI not just as a recommender, but as a creator. “AI is not just going to be recommending content, but… creating it,” Zuckerberg said. This follows the ongoing shift from friends-and-family content to creator-driven content that Reels and other Meta surfaces promote.

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