Meta used Advertising Week New York on October 6 to announce a set of AI tools for advertisers, headlined by plans to let the Meta AI business assistant in Ads Manager plan campaigns, update targeting and change budgets through conversation. Most of the assistant features are still in testing. Two items, Customer Lifecycle Strategy and video generation from static images in Advantage+ creative, are now generally available, the company said.

The business assistant is getting creative insights drawn from Ads Creative Studio, plus longer memory of an advertiser’s history, including the previous quarter’s tests, seasonality and stated goals, according to Meta. The company said it is also testing a way to import strategy, brand voice and brand guidelines from other AI tools.

Meta said advertisers who adopt the assistant’s recommendations “are typically seeing 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion” than those who do not. The announcement did not give a sample size or describe how the figure was calculated.

Agentic features remain in test

The larger change is what Meta calls agentic capabilities. Marketers will be able to plan and create campaigns, generate images and ad text, update targeting and change budgets by talking to the assistant, with previews, approvals and controls that set what the assistant may handle. Meta described these as being tested. It is also testing scheduled tasks and alerts, such as performance monitoring, weekly summaries and budget review reminders.

For large advertisers and agencies, Meta expanded the Meta Ads MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which lets third-party AI tools work with ad accounts. The server now supports uploading creative, previewing ads as they will appear on Facebook and Instagram, and tracking performance. Work staged by an agent “lands as a draft in Ads Manager,” and every action is “gated behind advertiser-set permissions and explicit approval before anything goes live,” Meta wrote. It named 10 partners integrating the server: AdManage.ai, Birch, Blip, Databricks, Innovid, Kochava, Perplexity, Reportei, Snowflake and Triple Whale.

Targeting and creative

Customer Lifecycle Strategy is now available to all advertisers. For acquisition campaigns, it recommends excluding existing customers so advertisers do not have to build those exclusions by hand. Meta is testing a simpler option that excludes an entire group of existing customers with a single Audience Label.

A separate tool lets brand advertisers and agencies describe an ideal customer in plain language, after which Ads Manager surfaces matching audiences that marketers can keep or discard. Meta said it “will be available in Detailed Targeting by the end of the year.”

On creative, Advantage+ creative can now generate video from existing static assets. Ads Creative Studio, a creative workspace Meta tested over the summer, is rolling out to more advertisers; Social Media Today reported that the expansion takes the tool beyond the selected partners that first had access. The studio can generate new video concepts and edit hooks, audio, clip length, text overlays, captions and end scenes.

Catalog advertisers in a beta can turn product images into product video. Meta is also scaling “smart product recommendations,” which analyze an ad’s image, text and landing page to identify the featured product and suggest related items from the same collection or best sellers. Meta said more than 60% of the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram is with video.

Whitney Mortimer, VP, executive creative director at Tinuiti, was quoted in Meta’s post: “Ads Creative Studio from Meta is a strong foundation for creative optimization.”

Checkout inside conversations

Meta also outlined commerce tests. It is testing a direct checkout experience with Shopify in Meta Business Agent on Messenger, so people can buy after learning about a product from a brand’s agent. Meta said that “this fall” it will begin testing direct checkout in Meta AI with Adyen, PayPal, Shopify and Stripe. For Muse for Small Business, a recently introduced assistant for small businesses’ operations and ad campaigns, Meta is adding the PayPal wallet alongside Link by Stripe and Shop Pay. No timing was given.

Why it matters

For merchants that buy Meta ads, the generally available features are the ones that can be used now. Lifecycle recommendations change how acquisition campaigns treat existing customers, and static-to-video generation lets advertisers create video from images they already have, on apps where Meta says most time is spent with video.

The agentic features are announced but not broadly available, and Meta’s own description puts previews, permissions and approvals at the center of how they will work. The MCP server expansion matters most to agencies and brands that already manage campaigns through outside software, because agent-built work arrives as a draft that still needs sign-off in Ads Manager. The 5% conversion figure is Meta’s claim and comes without published methodology.

What to watch

Meta set a year-end target for plain-language audience discovery in Detailed Targeting and a “this fall” window for checkout tests in Meta AI. It gave no dates for broad release of the assistant’s agentic campaign actions, scheduled tasks or the Audience Label exclusion test.

The caveats

This report is based on Meta’s announcement and trade coverage of it. Meta did not publish country availability for the new features or methodology for the performance and usage figures it cited, and several items are described only as tests.