Meta and TikTok push AI ad tools into agentic territory
At Advertising Week in New York, both Meta and TikTok announced new AI-powered ad features that shift more hands-on work from humans to agents.
What Meta Is Shipping
Meta’s business assistant is getting persistent memory. It will recall past campaigns, seasonal patterns, and advertiser goals across sessions. Meta is also testing tools that let you upload strategy documents and brand guidelines directly into the assistant.
More importantly, the assistant can now take action. It can generate creative, adjust targeting, and move budgets based on chat prompts. Scheduled performance reports and alerts are in testing as well.
Two other updates are worth noting. Ads Creative Studio, which suggests creative edits based on campaign performance, is rolling out to more advertisers. And Meta’s Ads MCP server is expanding, which means you can connect third-party AI tools to build and run campaigns through your own setup. Checkout inside Meta AI and Messenger conversations is being trialled, including a Shopify integration.
What TikTok Is Shipping
TikTok launched a conversational Shopping Assistant that remembers user preferences and recommends products, with checkout available without leaving the app. The move appears aimed at competing with Meta’s AI assistant app Muse, which has passed 5 million downloads.
The Operator Takeaway
Handing ad budgets to opaque platform automation carries real risk, especially when your budget is small. The MCP expansion is the more interesting development for operators who want actual control: you can run Meta campaigns from your own AI assistant using your own data rather than relying entirely on Meta’s black box.
Two practical moves worth considering now. First, if Meta’s import tools ship, load your brand guidelines and campaign history before the assistant touches any spend. Its default sense of seasonality will follow retail calendars, not your release or launch cycles. Second, keep your Shopify catalogue fully synced to Meta and TikTok Shop with complete descriptions and variants. Shopping assistants can only surface products they can see.
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