Meta's splashy new business AI hire offers yet another reason to bank on Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg did it again. Meta Platforms owned the news cycle last week, as the CEO showcased consumer artificial intelligence innovations, from the company’s Muse personal agent to new iterations of smart glasses, and the stock soared 13%. This week, Zuckerberg came right out of the gate with a splashy foray into helping businesses grow with AI. The breather in shares in Monday’s down market notwithstanding, Zuckerberg revealed plans for a new Meta Enterprise Platform business to be headed by MongoDB CEO CJ Desai. The move adds another positive element to the path ahead for Meta and its stock. News of Desai’s departure from MongoDB, which specializes in storing, managing, and processing massive datasets, was devastating. MongoDB’s stock sank 18.5% on the announcement, showing the significance of losing Desai to Meta, and just how important enterprise AI is to Zuckerberg. Desai, who will report directly to Zuckerberg, is ideal for his new role, which will initially prioritize bringing together the company’s Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, and Muse Code. Before going to MongoDB as CEO in November 2025, Desai spent a little over a year as president of product and engineering at Cloudflare, whose products make websites faster, safer, and more dependable. Starting in late 2016, he spent more than 7.5 years rising through the ranks to president and COO of ServiceNow . During his career, he also spent time as an executive at Dell and an engineer at Oracle . With that resume, Desai clearly has the kind of experience Meta needs as it looks to build a software platform that resonates with the world’s top corporations and organizations. Since Meta’s Muse personal AI agent launched earlier this month, the stock has soared nearly 18%, including Monday’s nearly 5% drop. Wall Street has jumped back into the stock, as the company’s once-derided hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investments have started bearing fruit — not to mention how Meta was able to settle massive youth social media addiction litigation for much less than what it could have faced on the wrong end of losses in the courtroom. Stepping out from its legal and spending overhangs, Meta’s new enterprise venture is especially exciting considering that the company doesn’t currently have a true enterprise arm. While it certainly has ties to the business world given the tools it provides companies to run and make advertisements and communicate with customers via Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg used social media to usher in a new era at Meta. “We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses. Meta already serves billions of people at scale and helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers. Today we are starting the next major pillar of our business, Meta Enterprise Platform, to help businesses use AI to grow and transform in new ways as well,” he wrote. Enterprise revenue tends to be more resilient — whereas consumers may have no issue pausing a monthly subscription now and then as needed, companies don’t have that luxury. Put another way, enterprise-based revenue streams are more immune to macroeconomic fluctuations and therefore more reliable when trying to model future financials. The Street tends to reward more durable revenue streams with higher valuation multiples. To be sure, the competition Meta is gearing up to go against is the most cutthroat in the world, whether we’re talking about the pure-play enterprise software names like ServiceNow and fellow Club name Salesforce , or public cloud players like portfolio names Microsoft , Alphabet and Amazon . Though Monday’s news reads more like a shot at the former cohort, given that Meta still doesn’t appear to want to simply rent out compute, the fact that Meta has its own massive data center footprint means that it could pull workloads running in those public clouds into its own established infrastructure. Having a leading model in Muse and vertical integration should certainly help. While we think this is a smart move, made from a position of strength, it’s not a needle-mover in the near-term as far as earnings are concerned. Having a leading model in Muse and vertical integration should certainly help, but it will take time to stand up the enterprise business. Even then, management will still need to convince companies to consider Meta over the vendors they already work with. There are certainly going to be some growing pains. In fact, over the weekend, a social media user claimed that they had an issue with their Muse agent conducting Facebook Marketplace negotiations on their behalf. The user claimed that Muse accepted a lowball offer and, worse yet, provided the buyer with the seller’s home address. The story, on its face, seems troubling and likely explains why Meta shares are lower Monday despite the encouraging enterprise push. However, we’re reserving judgement for the moment because it’s not quite clear what happened: was this a true breach on the agent’s part, or did the user perhaps accidentally give it more freedom than anticipated? Even if the latter is true, it speaks to the risk of putting such powerful tools in the hands of those who may not be the most technologically proficient, and the liability that can bring a company. However, that would be far more addressable, and in turn less concerning, than a breach like what we saw from OpenAI earlier this year, where rogue AI agents broke out of what was supposed to be a controlled testing environment and hacked online websites, such as Hugging Face. We reached out to Meta for comment on the alleged Marketplace incident, and a company spokesperson pointed us in the direction of an X post from David Singleton, a vice president of engineering for Meta Superintelligence Labs. Singleton said he’s reached out to the Muse user about their experience and claims. “In the past, when we’ve worked with users to investigate similar reports, we’ve consistently learned that Muse was following direct instructions and correctly asked for permission,” Singleton wrote. Bottom line Monday’s news isn’t going to move earnings in the near term. However, it is a notable positive that should help the stock going forward. First, it speaks to Zuckerberg’s desire to have a leading model that Meta has full control over, and it helps justify and rationalize in the minds of investors the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI infrastructure. It should also make spending commentary on future earnings calls a little easier to stomach. Second, standing up a dedicated enterprise platform provides investors a more concrete understanding of where the puck is going. Given it’s a new business, it stands to reason that the Wall Street consensus estimates are not factoring in the future revenue and earnings-per-share boost that it can provide. As a result, when looking out to the end of the decade, Meta stock is likely cheaper than it appears on a price-to-earnings valuation basis. That’s saying a lot because it’s already pretty darn cheap — 14.6 times 2029 earnings estimates, according to FactSet. So, shares are likely currently trading at a valuation lower than that based on the outyear numbers, which will need to be increased as the Meta Enterprise Platform grows and starts generating real money. That dynamic makes Meta Stock all the more attractive for those with a longer-term investing horizon. Of course, a new revenue stream means a new avenue for growth, so along with the idea that the true three-year forward earnings multiple is likely lower than it appears, the growth rate is also likely higher. A higher growth rate usually means a higher valuation multiple. Put simply, don’t let Monday’s decline in Meta scare you out of the stock. The reality is that the future looks even brighter for Meta now than it did at the end of last week. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long META, AMZN, MSFT, and CRM. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. 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