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.