This artificial intelligence (AI) innovator could be sitting on a $100 billion opportunity that could send shares soaring 67%

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to unlock billions of dollars in value for businesses through more efficient and effective work assisted by AI. Some of the biggest early winners in AI are the companies that make it possible to develop and train large language models, the core technology behind generative AI. But long-term winners may be the companies best able to use AI to improve their businesses while helping other companies improve their own operations.

Meta platforms (Meta -1.50%) is one of the potential long-term winners. In fact, it could be sitting on a $100 billion option, according to William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart. He sees Meta acting as a key facilitator for companies looking to use AI to interact with more customers. That’s how it could send shares that rose approx. 67% over the next few years.

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The great opportunity for artificial intelligence at Meta

Meta has been working on tools to help companies create their own AI chatbots for a few years now. It launched an alpha test in September 2023, and it expanded it to thousands of additional companies a few months ago. Schackart sees the big opportunity coming as Meta expands the service to all companies on its platform.

Meta’s AI tools allow businesses to create and train their own AI chatbots that can provide customer support and facilitate sales. With over 200 million businesses on its apps, Meta has a massive addressable market to sell its AI tools. Schackart believes that many companies will pay meta directly for the ability to offload WhatsApp conversations to AI.

He believes that strong adoption among businesses will lead WhatsApp users to engage in an average of 1.6 conversations with Business AI chatbots per Day in 2030. At an average cost of $0.04 each, that’s a $45 billion revenue opportunity for Meta. He believes that if Meta had an auction for chatbot conversation pricing, it could fetch more than $100 billion from companies.

Meta has had limited success charging companies for advanced features in the past. Its WhatsApp business platform, which made up Meta’s “other revenue” line, generates a small amount of revenue compared to its advertising platform. As such, it may make more sense for Meta to monetize AI chatbots with its advertising products. Specifically, click-to-demand ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Using advertising to unlock the value of AI chatbots can enable meta to scale the feature to more businesses, ultimately leading to better long-term results. AI-powered chatbots could allow businesses to process more conversations with potential customers and close more sales with lower overhead. As a result, the value of click-to-demand advertising should increase as more businesses adopt and improve the technology. This is a natural way to introduce auction pricing to monetize AI chatbot conversations, even if companies don’t pay for AI directly.

Ultimately, the meta may settle on a hybrid approach. Currently, WhatsApp for Business includes free messaging for conversations initiated via a click-to-medicine ad for the first 72 hours. Paying a slightly higher price for messages sent via AI chatbot after 72 hours is likely to be worth it for most businesses since they are not paying a human agent to interact with customers.

What it all means for investors

Meta is already a massive company. It generated an estimated $163 billion in 2024, and analysts expect it to grow sales to $186 billion this year. Still, an extra $100 billion in sales by 2030 would be a huge addition to Meta’s top line.

It’s worth noting that Meta spends quite a bit to improve its AI capabilities. Meta’s capital expenditures come in between $38 billion and $40 billion for 2024, and management said it expects significant growth in capital expenditures in 2025. These upfront cash expenditures will begin to show up as depreciation expense on META’s income statement over time, which could amount to Earnings if the meta does not continue to grow its top line.

It is also important to note that running AI applications is relatively expensive, especially at the scale of 3 billion monthly users. Part of Meta’s investments in the next few years will likely go towards bringing AI inference costs down significantly. That should make it much more profitable to give away Ai Chatbots.

If the opportunity turns out to be as large as Schackart estimates, $100 billion by 2030, those costs will be worth it. Meta should see strong margin expansion at that scale, even with the added costs of developing and deploying AI. If Meta maintains its current price to sales multiple, it will send shares at 67% higher price for sale.

But remember that Business Chatbots are far from the only revenue opportunity at Meta. It wouldn’t be a surprise for stocks to soar even more than 67% before 2030.