Salesforce and Meta now report real revenue and usage from AI agents that handle customer chats, and Meta has begun charging larger businesses by usage.
AI agents are now showing up in earnings reports. Salesforce says its agent platform brings in more than $1.5 billion a year. Meta says more than 2 million businesses use its Business Agent every week. For a small business owner, that means a chat helper on WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram is a real product, and some versions now carry usage-based fees.
An AI agent is software that does a task on its own instead of just answering a question. In these examples, agents answer customers, book appointments, resolve support tickets and complete sales. The source is a press-release style piece that highlights four companies, including one very small one.
Meta's Business Agent works inside WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. It answers questions, recommends products, books appointments and closes sales. Meta says people hold over 30 million conversations with Business Agents each week. It estimates at least 500 million small businesses use its apps.
Meta has also started charging larger businesses based on token usage. A token is a small chunk of text an AI reads or writes, so a busier agent costs more. A separate platform lets larger firms build custom agents that connect to tools like Shopify and Zendesk.
Salesforce reports that annual recurring revenue from its Agentforce platform topped $1.5 billion, up more than 240% from a year earlier. Annual recurring revenue is the yearly value of subscriptions and similar repeat payments. The figure now includes its Slackbot and Headless 360 offerings. About $800 million was reported at the end of the prior fiscal year.
The piece also features Change Agents Corporation, a small company that sells subscription tools to small businesses. Its Beacon product checks how often AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Claude recommend a business compared with competitors. It starts with a free audit that takes five minutes or less and covers roughly 100 common customer questions.
The company also works on a video tool called Catch-Up and says it is expanding into counter-drone technology. Treat the coverage with care. It reads as promotional, and it is not investment advice.
The material does not give Meta's token prices, and it does not say whether smaller businesses will be charged too. It gives no pricing for Beacon or for Salesforce's agents. It also offers no independent measure of how well any of these agents handle customers. Owners who try one should watch the cost and the quality of the chats.
AI customer agents are now paid products, so a small business should check the usage fees and the quality of the chats before relying on one.
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