❯ Meta launches an enterprise unit and hires MongoDB’s CEO to sell its Muse agent to businesses

A CEO jumps, a stock dropsMeta has created a new business unit, Meta Enterprise Platform, led by CJ Desai, who had been MongoDB CEO for less than a year, as chief enterprise platform officer reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg. According to CNBC, MongoDB shares fell more than 18% on the news and Meta shares fell about 5%; former CEO Dev Ittycheria is MongoDB’s interim chief.

Muse goes firstThe new unit will first push the Muse agent, a business customer-service agent and a coding tool, packaged for companies and developers. Muse has taken off with consumers, but ordinary people use it infrequently and are hard to convert to paying. This week Meta also launched Muse for Small Business, connecting it to 15 business apps such as Slack, QuickBooks, Shopify and Stripe for multi-step tasks. Desai was previously president and COO of ServiceNow and president of product and engineering at Cloudflare, with long experience selling and delivering enterprise software.

Meta needs a new businessMeta’s capital spending on AI has been enormous, and beyond advertising it needs large, high-ticket enterprise revenue renewed annually to spread those costs. That is exactly the market OpenAI and Anthropic are already fighting over; Meta’s edge is its relationships with vast numbers of small merchants through ads and shops. The hiring focus is shifting too: two years ago labs fought over top researchers, now they pay up for leaders who know enterprise sales and operations.

▪ SIGNALBy poaching a public-company CEO, Zuckerberg is buying the capability Meta lacks most: turning AI into contracts businesses renew every year.