Meta AI Assistant has launched in the UK

After successful testing in the US, India and Australia, Meta recently announced the rollout of its AI assistant in six new countries, including the UK.

According to TechCrunch, the AI assistant is available across Meta’s portfolio of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as the Meta.ai website.

Using Meta’s open-source AI model, Llama 3.2, the AI assistant can edit your photos, leverage generative AI to create photos through language prompts, as well as use celebrity voices and lip-synced translations.

With AI integration, the social media giant aims to make the experience of its apps more personal to the user, increasing your average usage time on each of them. The cynical view is that this will expose users to more ads, which will prompt brands to invest more marketing spend – thus growing Meta’s revenue.

What does this mean for users?

With every major innovation, there is always a split between early adopters and people who are more resistant to change. Make no mistake, generative AI is arguably the most impactful technological innovation this century – and for some, that causes concern.

Concern and misunderstanding are the main causes behind the recent viral ‘Goodbye Meta AI’ Instagram Story, which was shared by millions across the world as an attempt to stop Meta leveraging personal data for its AI learning.

Spoiler alert – it didn’t. Users can still opt out of their data being used for Meta AI learning, although the process isn’t as simple as sharing a Story on Instagram surprisingly!

Despite the concerns, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta AI now has 500 million users across the world, adding that the chatbot is on track to become the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year.

Will we same the same rate of adoption in the UK as we have in other markets? Time will tell.

What does this mean for brands?

In short, the main saving for brands is time.

With the use of generative AI, the world of customer service has changed for good. Providing the AI assistant with responses to FAQs and enabling the AI to respond to community messages will help to guide basic queries. This will ease immediate customer concerns by getting answers quickly.

For larger brands, automated and accurate customer service will save a huge amount of time trawling through messages on a daily basis – although the risk with this is that responses lose their personal approach and tone-of voice, both vital considerations in a brand’s messaging strategy.

Another benefit for brands is creative assistance. The AI will generate ideas for posts, product descriptions and captions, speeding up the process of content creation. With text and image generation, your next content plan could be made in less than 30-minutes.

The ability to save time is tempting and appealing. However, over-reliance on AI to create social content could inhibit your brand’s performance long-term.

Traditionally, social platforms were made for people to build a sense of community. Whilst they have drastically evolved since, every social platform strives to make the user experience one that is relevant, entertaining and useful.

A brand that relies entirely on AI to build content risks creating meaningful interactions with its community, as generative AI still isn’t sophisticated enough for sharp-eyed users not to pick holes and inconsistencies in it.

What does this mean for you?

The impact of TikTok on the wider social media spectrum means that content needs to be relevant, timely and trend-led. AI cannot (yet) do this for you, although we have a great team of content creators that can.

We would love the opportunity to discuss our Social Media services with you, please get in touch using the contact us button below and a member of our team will be in touch to discuss your brand’s objectives in more detail.

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