Key Points

• Meta plans to let brands create and target ads fully via artificial intelligence by the end of next year

• Meta’s AI ad tools will allow brands to create ads using a product’s image and a budgetary goal

• Some brands worry AI-generated ads won’t match human-made quality, while smaller businesses could benefit from easier ad creation

Meta Platforms is betting that automation is the future of ads.

The social-media company aims to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meta’s ad platform already offers some AI tools that can generate variations of existing ads and make minor changes to them before targeting the ads to users on Facebook and Instagram. Now, the company aims to help brands create advertising concepts from scratch. 

AI-powered advertising is part of Meta Chief Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for his company’s evolution. Advertising makes up the bulk of Meta’s business—it brought in more than 97% of overall revenue in 2024—and funds its multibillion-dollar investments in AI chips and data centers, and for training cutting-edge AI models.

Using the ad tools Meta is developing, a brand could present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video and text. The system would then decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target and offer suggestions on budget, people familiar with the matter said. 

Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, the people said. A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.

Increasingly sophisticated AI tools are starting to enable businesses to create full photo and video ads without having to spend the money and hire production crews. Google released a new version of its video-generation tool called Veo at its annual developer conference last month that allows people to create short videos from a text prompt. 

“In the not-too-distant future, we want to get to a world where any business will be able to just tell us what objective they’re trying to achieve, like selling something or getting a new customer, how much they’re willing to pay for each result, and connect their bank account and then we just do the rest for them,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting last week. On a separate podcast appearance, he called it “a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

Generating ads from scratch with AI could be a boon to small and midsize businesses, which represent most of the advertisers on Meta’s platforms and often lack big budgets for ad creation. 

Some big brands are wary of providing Meta even more control over their advertising efforts, given the company’s heft in the business and worry that AI-generated campaigns won’t have the same look and feel as human-made ads.

Although most tech companies have high hopes for AI-generated ads, some brands say the technology that exists throughout the industry often produces distorted or unusable visuals. Improving the quality of these outputs often requires time and resource-intensive work. 

Meta’s new tools also require a lot of computing power and the creation of unique AI models for each brand, the people said.

Newer AI companies are also racing to help advertisers create content. Many brands, for example, are already using third-party tools such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E to create the ads they place on all digital platforms, including Meta’s. Meta said it is exploring how to integrate those tools into its platform.