Meta's Chief Data Officer Alex Schultz has positioned agentic commerce as the company's next major business opportunity, telling CoinDesk Spotlight host Sam Ewen that "we think it might be the next tier of business for our entire company." According to reports from CoinDesk, Schultz framed the agentic economy as already present but not yet mainstream, similar to how science fiction author William Gibson described the future. The company is currently building business agents for all businesses, with over a million weekly active businesses using Meta agents from virtually nothing at the start of the year.
Schultz outlined a vision where agents handle mundane tasks like coordinating birthday parties through WhatsApp, booking times, checking calendars, finding venues, and communicating with other parents' agents. As reported by CoinDesk, he emphasized that if agents can handle low-stakes logistics, they can scale to handle supply chain negotiations, financial settlements, and cross-border commerce. The payments layer within this vision centers on stablecoins, with Schultz predicting "We completely believe in the future of there being no wallets and digital payments being the whole future." He cited WeChat's red envelope model and Line's commerce infrastructure in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan as proof that conversational commerce at scale is not theoretical.
According to CoinDesk reports, Schultz highlighted Meta's success in Brazil and India, where the company has more than a million small businesses doing commerce in conversation on WhatsApp. He criticized the United States' reliance on iMessage as "very backwards," stating that while American consumers tap to pay in stores, conversational commerce has become the standard in Asia. Fortune Business Insights predicts this market will grow to $39.53 billion by 2034, largely driven by AI integration. Recent developments at The Asian Banker Summit 2026 demonstrate that digital banks in Asia are successfully deploying AI agents across credit, fraud and customer operations, with practitioners from NatWest Group, UOB and Teleperformance arguing that unclear processes and weak data foundations impact agentic AI deployment more than the technology itself.
The conversation occurred on the seventh anniversary of Facebook's Libra announcement, with Schultz acknowledging the regulatory challenges that followed. As reported by CoinDesk, he framed Meta's current approach as partnership-focused rather than proprietary currency development. The company's strategy involves being the interface layer for messaging and commerce while payment settlement moves underneath it. This approach reflects the dramatically changed regulatory landscape since Libra, with Meta now pursuing integration of regulated third-party stablecoins into its platforms rather than issuing its own global stablecoin. Recent industry developments show that banks are now picking lanes before standards settle, with CBDCs, stablecoins and tokenized deposits moving past the pilot stage, forcing institutions to confront trust, interoperability and regulatory gaps between experimentation and scale.
When asked about decentralization and proof-of-humanity systems, Schultz expressed strong interest, stating "Decentralization, especially if we can take verification outside of our system — my God, it would be useful for us." According to CoinDesk reports, he noted that Meta hasn't implemented decentralized solutions yet because no system has the scale, reliability, or mainstream penetration to warrant going all-in. However, he emphasized that "Really smart people have tried, and it's not there yet." The core challenge remains verification: "For you to transact with an agent, you need to know it represents the business it says it represents," as Schultz wrote in a post on the agentic economy. Recent technology leaders from Hong Leong Bank, Maybank, State Bank of India and Ant Digital Technologies argue that artificial intelligence is forcing banks to confront the operating foundations that will determine whether automation becomes a source of advantage or exposure.
