What’s next for Mr Zuckerberg’s AI approach?

While everyone has been watching OpenAI, Google and Anthropic battle it out for AI supremacy, Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly assembling the pieces of a very different strategy.

He isn’t chasing headlines. He’s building an ecosystem.

Billions of people already communicate every day across WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Threads. Add AI to that network and you have something far more valuable than another chatbot. You have an intelligent assistant woven into your everyday digital life.

I’ve seen first-hand what agentic AI can do. Earlier this year I spent four months using Manus AI to produce two three-hour radio shows every week. I simply provided the playlist and a brief. The AI created the entire programme. My role was to bring it to life with personality, emotion, energy and timing. It wasn’t replacing me. It was multiplying what I could produce. In December last year, Meta bought Manus AI, a startup, for $2Bn.

Now look at what else Meta has been quietly building.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are becoming the eyes and ears. Meta AI is becoming the brain. Together they create an AI that sees what you see, hears what you hear and is always ready to help.

At the centre is Meta One, a single membership that connects your Meta services into one seamless experience. Alongside it, launched a few weeks ago, are enhanced subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, giving creators and businesses greater visibility, higher limits, pinned content, spotlighted stories and premium features. All for less than the monthly cost of many standalone AI subscriptions.

This is classic Zuckerberg.

He doesn’t make a huge fanfare. He quietly introduces new features, lets early adopters discover them, then everyone else starts noticing them in other people’s posts. You wonder why you don’t have that feature. Then comes the invitation, the subtle advert, the upgrade prompt… and before you know it, you’re using it too.

It’s a remarkably smart strategy because it feels natural rather than forced.

For creators, businesses and anyone serious about social marketing, this could be one of the biggest platform shifts we’ve seen in years.

Don’t underestimate Mr Z. While everyone else has been focussed on building the smartest AI model, he may be building the smartest AI ecosystem.

The game has only just begun.

(P.S. Image created by ChatGPT)