Meta’s Chief Data Officer Says Agentic Commerce is the “Next Tier of Business”

In a wide-ranging conversation on CoinDesk Spotlight, Schultz laid out a view of Meta’s future in which agentic commerce is not a product category but an inevitability.

“We think it might be the next tier of business for our entire company,” he told host, Sam Ewen.

The Agentic Economy Is Already Here, But It’s Unevenly Distributed

Schultz framed the agentic economy the same way science fiction author William Gibson framed the future: already present, not yet mainstream.

“We are building business agents for all businesses,” he said. “We have over a million weekly active businesses with Meta agents[…] from basically nothing at the start of the year.”

The use case he outlined was deliberately mundane: coordinating a child’s birthday party. Agents booking times, checking calendars, finding venues, communicating with other parents’ agents, all on WhatsApp. The point of the mundane example is that it scales. If agents can handle low-stakes logistics, they can handle supply chain negotiations, financial settlements, and cross-border commerce.

“You write that example large,” Schultz said, “and then if you’re us, you hope that you do it over WhatsApp”

The payments layer inside that vision is stablecoins.

Schultz sees physical wallets as obsolete, predicting “We completely believe in the future of there being no wallets and digital payments being the whole future,” he said, pointing to WeChat’s red envelope model and Line’s commerce infrastructure in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan as proof that conversational commerce at scale is not theoretical. “Stablecoins are a big part of the solution.”

Both WeChat and Line have been at the forefront of digital peer to peer payments and in-app commerce throughout Asia.

He added that he thinks the United States’ reliance on iMessage is “very backwards.” In Brazil and India Schultz said Meta has more than a million small businesses doing commerce in conversation on WhatsApp.

“iMessage is such a lame platform in terms of its usage and what you can do with it,” he said. While American consumers tap to pay in stores, conversational commerce has become the standard in Asia. It creates a direct path and connection between consumers and merchants, often supercharged by trusted creators and influencers. Fortune Business Insights predicts it will grow to $39.53 billion by 2034, largely driven by AI.

Meta, Libra, and the Road Back to Digital Payments

The conversation happened on the seventh anniversary of Facebook’s Libra announcement. A moment Schultz acknowledged with a dry aside: “Maybe we said some stuff that annoyed some governments.”