• by Colin Kirkland , 2 hours ago

Meta is continuing to build out its roster of AI-powered tools for advertisers and businesses, with enhancements planned for the company’s business assistant, as well as automated shopping, creative, and targeting capabilities.

The tech giant began its presentation at Advertising Week New York (AWNY) with a detailed description of its expanded business assistant, originally rolled out to all advertisers in April.

Designed to optimize campaign performance via tailored AI-powered recommendations and real-time guidance based on an account’s business data, Meta’s business assistant is gaining new features, such as creative insights and expanded memory functionality.

Meta is also testing a range of new agentic capabilities designed to help advertisers automate more of their day-to-day tasks.

Through conversational commands, advertisers can plan and create a campaign, generate creative images and text, update targeting or change their budget, while being able to give the assistant scheduled tasks and alerts to handle recurring work, such as performance monitoring, weekly summaries, and reminders to review budgets.

According to Meta’s presentation, advertisers adopting the Meta AI business assistant are seeing 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion than those who don’t.

Additionally, Meta is bringing its Ads Creative Studio to more advertisers. The product uses AI to analyze a brand’s performance and audience data to show what is working in current campaigns and how to best develop future campaigns.

By the end of 2026, advertisers will also gain access to AI-enabled audience discovery, inviting brands to describe their ideal customer conversationally, then allowing Ads Manager to present what it believes to be the most relevant audiences based on the description.

Meta has also made its Customer Lifecycle Strategy tool available to all advertisers.

“With this feature, marketers can specify that a campaign is for acquisition, and they’ll receive recommendations about excluding existing customers, instead of having to assemble those exclusions from scratch,” a company statement explains. “We're also testing ways to make this simpler, like excluding an entire group of existing customers with a single Audience Label.”

Following the testing of a full-screen Reels feed on Facebook, Meta is also doubling down on the fusion of generative AI and video content.

With people spending more than half their time on Facebook and Instagram watching videos, Meta is trying to help businesses better use AI to create videos for social media users.

In Advantage+ creative, advertisers and agencies can now generate video from existing static assets, whereas in Ads Creative Studio, marketers can generate different versions of the same video by using tools that change hooks, adjust audio and clip length, add text overlays and captions, or change end scenes.

Eligible catalog advertisers, on the other hand, can now use Advantage+ to transform their product images into product videos, and Meta plans to launch an upcoming test designed to identify an ad’s featured product and recommend similar products from the same brand that could be paired with the ad.

Finally, Meta is using its partnership with Shopify to test a direct checkout experience through the Meta Business Agent on its Messenger app, designed to let people buy a Shopify product in-stream.

Meta is testing similar direct checkout experiences through Meta AI with additional ecommerce platforms, including Adyen, PayPal, and Stripe.