Meta's VP EMEA, Derya Matras, said businesses are facing a 'mindset gap' as AI reshapes operations, not just software stacks. She said too many firms are using the technology to do the same work 'just slightly faster' instead of rethinking how the whole business works.
Matras said agentic AI is different because it can be proactive, take autonomous action and handle multi-step strategies. In her view, it 'stops being a search engine and becomes a colleague.' She also said AI can automate personalization at scale, but not creativity itself.
In a post for Fortune, Matras pointed to the UK as the world's third-largest AI market and said government-backed investment is helping companies scale. Still, she said many businesses are deploying transformative technology to preserve old habits, creating 'an expensive treadmill dressed up as innovation.'
She said the tension is visible inside companies: CFOs want incrementality, CEOs see a larger strategic bet, and CMOs are caught in the middle between long-term brand value and short-term efficiency gains. At the same time, she said AI-native competitors are appearing quickly and disrupting categories before incumbents finish pilot programs.
Matras cited more than one million businesses already using AI agents on WhatsApp and Messenger. She said these tools have evolved from simple chatbots into proactive Business AIs that know customers, remember preferences and help them buy. She also pointed to Movida, one of Brazil's largest car rental companies, which used Meta Business Agent to bring its booking journey into a single WhatsApp conversation.
According to Matras, Movida saw a 44% increase in daily bookings in one month, and 85% of conversations were resolved entirely by the AI agent. She also quoted Aesha Karunakaran, CEO of Protein Milkshake, who said Meta's AI business assistant gave her back time to focus on creativity and customers.
Matras said the biggest shift is that AI no longer belongs only to large organizations with the budget to match. She said a startup in Manchester can now access the same strategic intelligence and responsiveness as a global enterprise, and she said she genuinely believes single-person billion-dollar companies are coming.
That is the part the market should not miss. When AI lowers the cost of coordination, personalization and customer response, it changes the economics of scale. The old advantage was capital intensity and headcount. The new advantage is leverage.
For entrepreneurs, that is a free-enterprise story. For the incumbents, it is a warning. Capital rewards clear rules, but it also rewards speed, and AI is compressing the gap between a garage startup and a global platform. The companies that treat it as a minor upgrade may discover the market has already voted.
