More Than Chatbots: Why Business AI Agents Are Big Tech's Next Battleground

On 19 June 2026, Inside Retail Australia republished an analysis essay originally written for The Conversation by Guy Bate, a professional teaching fellow in management and international business at the University of Auckland.

The piece makes a clear argument: the next phase of artificial intelligence is agentic AI — systems that can take actions on a business's behalf, rather than simply answer questions in a chat window. The news peg behind the commentary is Meta's launch of a product called Business Agent.

It's worth being upfront about what this is. The article is opinion and analysis, not breaking news, and it builds its case around one concrete, verifiable development. So treat the framing as informed commentary, with a real product launch sitting underneath it.

Meta announced Business Agent on 3 June 2026 at its Conversations conference in London. Unlike the earlier chatbots that simply replied to messages, this newer tool is designed to do things: answer customer questions, qualify leads, manage bookings and even process transactions — all inside WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

According to Meta, more than one million businesses were already using earlier chatbot versions of these tools on WhatsApp and Messenger. The upgraded agent extends those capabilities to Instagram and is being made available to businesses of every size worldwide, with free initial access and paid tiers to follow.

The move positions Meta against rivals including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft, all of which are converging on agentic AI from different starting points — search, cloud, productivity software and consumer chat.

Two figures anchor the analysis. First, the scale of the platform doing the launching: Meta's full-year 2025 revenue was approximately US$201 billion (officially US$200,966 million), up 22% on the prior year — a reminder that this is an advertising-driven giant with enormous reach into customer conversations.

Second, the projected size of the opportunity. The essay cites a market forecast that agentic AI could grow from around US$10.9 billion in 2026 to roughly US$183 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50%. That figure comes from research firm Grand View Research, so it's worth treating as a vendor forecast rather than settled fact — but it captures why so many large players are investing heavily.

The core thesis of the piece is less about technology and more about commercial power. If an AI agent inside a messaging app can handle discovery, recommendation, booking and payment, then the platform mediating that conversation gains influence over the customer relationship.

The concern raised is that this could accelerate a shift away from the businesses that actually own the products and services, and toward the platforms that sit between them and their customers. For a retailer or service provider, the convenience of automated bookings and sales is real — but so is the risk of becoming dependent on a channel you don't control.

For Australian mid-market businesses, that's the practical question worth sitting with: agentic AI can do useful work, but on whose terms, and with whose data?

Whatever stance you take on Meta's Business Agent, the direction of travel is clear: AI is moving from answering to acting. An agent that can qualify a lead, book an appointment or complete a sale is only as good as the information it can draw on.

That's where the foundations matter. If your customer records, sales history, inventory or accounting data live in separate, disconnected systems, any AI agent — yours or a platform's — is working with a partial picture. The businesses best placed to benefit from agentic AI, and to keep control of their own customer relationships, are the ones whose data is unified, accurate and ready to use.

Bringing your business data from CRMs, accounting tools and other sources into one reliable place is what turns these capabilities from a headline into something you can actually act on — on your own terms. That single, AI-ready foundation is exactly what Intellova is built to provide.