AI-Powered Reels Make People Spend 24% More Time On Instagram: Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, executive chairman, and CEO of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), has said that since Meta launched TikTok-rival short-video app Reels, AI recommendations have driven a more than 24 percent increase in time spent by users on Instagram.

Mr. Zuckerberg specifically credited artificial intelligence for pushing content recommendations in users feeds for the increased engagement. According to him, the company's AI research is "driving good results across our apps and business."

More than 3 billion individuals are now daily utilising at least one of our apps, he claimed in a Facebook post announcing Meta's quarterly results.

"Our investment in recommendations and ranking systems has driven a lot of the results that we're seeing today across our discovery engine, reels, and ads."

"Along with surfacing content from friends and family, now more than 20% of content in your Facebook and Instagram feeds is recommended by AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don't follow. Across all of Instagram, that's about 40% of the content that you see. Since we launched Reels, AI recommendations have driven a more than 24% increase in time spent on Instagram," he continued.

Mentioning the monetary benefit of artificial intelligence use, he said, "Our AI work is also improving monetisation. Reels monetization efficiency is up over 30% on Instagram and over 40% on Facebook quarter over quarter. Daily revenue from Advantage+ shopping campaigns is up 7x in the last six months."

"Our work to build out business messaging as the next pillar of our business is making progress too. I shared last quarter that click-to-message ads reached a $10 billion revenue run rate. Since then, the number of businesses using our other business messaging service-paid messaging on WhatsApp-has grown by 40% quarter-over-quarter."

Meanwhile, Meta Platforms has merged its advertising product, business messaging and commerce departments into one division, The Information reported on Thursday, citing an internal message by company executive John Hegeman.

The move comes as part of a broader effort by the social media company to reduce the ranks of middle management across the company, the report said.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has also kicked off an aggressive cost-cutting drive, with plans to eliminate 21,000 jobs and flatten its middle-management structure as it works towards CEO Mark Zuckerberg's goal of turning 2023 into the "year of efficiency".