Nearly 10 million advertisers used at least one of Meta’s generative A.I. ad creative tools during the third quarter of 2026, the company disclosed on its earnings call Wednesday, the first time Meta has put a hard number on how deeply those features have been absorbed into its ad stack. Susan J. Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said adoption of its video-generation features grew 25 percent quarter over quarter. The framing is no longer experimental. The framing is scale.

Ms. Li tied that scale to a user base of at least 500 million self-identified small businesses on Meta’s family of apps, a figure she attributed to a recent internal survey. To illustrate what adoption actually looks like at the small-business end, she offered Simply Organic Maple, a family-run maple syrup producer in Vermont. After using the Meta AI Business Assistant, the company saw a 57 percent increase in purchases and a 36 percent reduction in cost per purchase. Its strongest revised ad delivered a 3x return on ad spend, a 52 percent improvement over the original.

The broader cohort numbers were softer but pointed the same way: Business Assistant adopters drove almost 5 percent more conversions at the same cost per conversion than comparable non-adopters, and increased their advertising investment by 9 percent.

Then Mark Zuckerberg widened the aperture. “A lot of people are actually using Muse today to help run especially small businesses,” he said, referring to Meta’s personal agent, which the company says has drawn more than 10 million users in the United States and Canada within six weeks. Small businesses, he indicated, are the next frontier for Muse itself.

That’s a notable escalation. Muse is already contacting small businesses on behalf of consumers, and Meta recently opened Instagram live-video ads to all brands. An agent that handles both the inbound call and the outbound ad is a different kind of product than either piece alone.

Ms. Li also guided Q4 revenue to between $73 billion and $76 billion, per the Motley Fool’s transcript of the call. The guidance is the headline for the street. The adoption numbers are the headline for anyone whose growth still runs through Facebook and Instagram, where the creative gap between advertisers who use these tools and those who don’t is now a quantified line on an earnings call.

Sources