Meta hires Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead new business AI group

Meta hired Salesforce’s CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta’s apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch.

“I’m thrilled to share today that I’ve joined Meta to lead a new Business AI group,” said Shih in a LinkedIn post. “Our vision for this new product group is to make cutting-edge AI accessible to every business, empowering all to find success and own their future in the AI era.”

Meta has a unusual business model around AI, claiming to use an open-source approach, though not by everyone’s definition of it. Mark Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t sell a subscription to its AI chatbots, like OpenAI or Google, in order to generate revenue. Instead, Meta is betting that its Llama large-language models will make its current family of apps that much better. These AI tools for businesses seem to be part of that effort.

Specifically, Meta’s new group will offer AI products made with Llama to the millions of businesses advertising and creating content on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. It’s unclear exactly what kind of tools Meta could offer these folks, but offering tools to create AI-generated ads seems likely. Meta has recently pushed more AI-generated content into its social media feeds, including a carousel on Facebook of AI-generated photos, and AI chatbots imitating content creators on Instagram.

That’s a notable shift for Meta’s platforms, which previously only featured human-generated content. Giving businesses tools to cheaply generate more ads could be quite lucrative for Meta. It’s unclear if Meta will sell these AI tools, or if they’ll be offered for free as a way to drive up ad spending – the company’s main source of revenue.

“We believe these latest advancements in AI represent a significant opportunity for businesses to drive more efficiencies and significantly improve the experiences they offer their customers,” said Meta’s VP and Head of Monetization, John Hegeman, in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “This new product group under Clara’s leadership will help us bring that vision to life.”

Shih previously led Salesforce’s AI efforts, which have not exactly been a huge success. In May, Salesforce’s shares dropped the most since 2008, largely because investors feared the enterprise giant had missed out on AI boom. The enterprise giant told investors at the time it expected to have the slowest growth ever in the coming quarter. Since then, Salesforce has leaned hard into AI, releasing an AI agent developer platform called Agentforce. Its CEO, Marc Benioff, has even gone on the offensive, publicly taking shots at Microsoft’s enterprise AI efforts.

Salesforce did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. It’s unclear at this time who will be taking over Shih’s role there.

Now, it seem Shih will have a chance to start something new at Meta, a company she wrote a book about in 2009 called “The Facebook Era.”