Meta Chief Data Officer: Agentic Commerce Is the ‘Next Tier of Business’

Jul 10, 2026 — Meta’s Chief Data Officer Alex Schultz declared agentic commerce the company’s “next tier of business,” revealing stablecoins are now assumed inside Meta’s infrastructure. Schultz detailed that over one million businesses are already running active Meta agents weekly, with the company betting conversational commerce will reshape global transactions.

Immediate Details & Direct Quotes

In a CoinDesk Spotlight interview, Schultz outlined Meta’s vision where AI agents handle everyday coordination tasks. “We think it might be the next tier of business for our entire company,” he told host Sam Ewen.

The executive illustrated the concept with a deliberately simple example: coordinating a child’s birthday party through WhatsApp. Agents would book times, check calendars, find venues, and communicate with other parents’ AI agents automatically.

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

The payments layer enabling this vision is stablecoins. Schultz predicted physical wallets will become obsolete. “We completely believe in the future of there being no wallets and digital payments being the whole future,” he stated, citing WeChat’s red envelope model and Line’s commerce infrastructure in Asia as proof of concept.

“Stablecoins are a big part of the solution,” Schultz added.

Market Context & Reaction

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

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

In Brazil and India, Schultz revealed Meta has more than one million small businesses conducting commerce through conversations on WhatsApp. He criticized the U.S. market’s reliance on iMessage, calling it “very backwards” and “such a lame platform in terms of its usage and what you can do with it.”

While American consumers primarily use tap-to-pay in stores, conversational commerce has become the standard across Asia, creating direct connections between consumers and merchants, often amplified by trusted creators and influencers.

Fortune Business Insights projects conversational commerce will grow to $39.53 billion by 2034, driven largely by AI integration.

Background & Historical Context

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

Meta’s original attempt to launch its own global stablecoin triggered intense scrutiny from Congress and U.S. regulators over financial stability, privacy, and the company’s potential influence over global payments. The project rebranded to Diem before being abandoned entirely in 2022 under sustained regulatory pressure.

Today, Schultz emphasized a partnership-driven approach rather than proprietary currency. “The history of the company is that we tend to be a partnership company on these things,” he said.

Meta now positions itself as the interface layer — the messaging and commerce surface — while payment settlement operates underneath through regulated third-party stablecoin integration. This reflects both the changed regulatory landscape with stablecoin legislation now in place and the SEC’s more accommodating stance toward crypto.

What This Means

Schultz was notably candid about Meta’s interest in decentralized identity systems. “Decentralization, especially if we can take verification outside of our system — my God, it would be useful for us,” he said.

He acknowledged Meta hasn’t adopted such systems yet because no solution has achieved the necessary scale, reliability, or mainstream penetration. “Really smart people have tried, and it’s not there yet,” Schultz noted.

The verification challenge remains critical for agentic commerce. As Schultz wrote in a post on the topic: “For you to transact with an agent, you need to know it represents the business it says it represents.”

Inside Meta, agentic payments, decentralized identity, and stablecoin rails are no longer treated as distant possibilities. They are treated as current realities being built into the company’s core infrastructure.

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