Meta hired Salesforce's CEO of AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new organization building AI tools for businesses that use Meta's apps to reach consumers, according to a LinkedIn post from Shih on Tuesday. Meta confirmed the appointment and the new Business AI group in a statement to TechCrunch.

“I’m thrilled to share today that I’ve joined Meta to lead a new Business AI group,” said Shih. “Our vision for this new product group is to make cutting-edge AI accessible to every business, empowering all to find success and own their future in the AI era.”

One of the executive positions will be taken by Adam Evans, another top Salesforce AI executive, to oversee the company's AI efforts. Evans is a new executive vice president and general manager of AI at Salesforce, according to his LinkedIn profile, TechCrunch has found.

Meta takes an unusual approach to business related to AI, claiming to employ an open source approach, but not necessarily according to the definition of others. Mark Zuckerberg's company doesn't sell a subscription to its AI chatbots, such as OpenAI or Google, to generate revenue. Instead, Meta is betting that its Llama large language models will make its current family of apps that much better. These AI tools for businesses appear to be part of that effort.

Specifically, Meta's new group will sell AI products built with Llama to the tens of millions of businesses advertising and creating content on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. It is not clear exactly what kind of tools Meta could offer these folks, but offering tools to create AI-generated ads seems likely. Meta has recently pushed more AI-generated content into its social media feeds, including a carousel on Facebook of AI-generated photos, and AI chatbots imitating content creators on Instagram.

That's a significant evolution for the Meta platforms, which had previously only shown content generated by humans. Empowering businesses to churn out more low-cost ads could be quite profitable for Meta. It's not clear if Meta will sell those AI tools or if they will give them away for free as a mechanism to drive up ad spend — its core source of revenue.

"We believe these newest developments in AI mark a powerful opportunity for businesses to unlock greater efficiencies and to fundamentally enhance the experiences they bring to their customers," Meta's VP and Head of Monetization, John Hegeman, said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. "This new product group under Clara's leadership will help us bring that vision to life."
Shih has worked on Salesforce's AI initiative. Not exactly a strong success. In May, Salesforce's shares fell by the most since 2008 as investors were fearful that the enterprise giant had missed the AI train. At the time, the enterprise giant said it expected the company to experience the slowest growth ever in the coming quarter. Since then, Salesforce has leaned hard into AI by releasing an AI agent developer platform called Agentforce. Even its CEO, Marc Benioff, has gone on the attack, publicly taking potshots at Microsoft's enterprise AI efforts.

Salesforce did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.

Now it appears that Shih will have the opportunity to start anew at Meta, a company she wrote a book about in 2009 called "The Facebook Era."