By Meghan Bobrowsky

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents.

In Zuckerberg's vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances.

"I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do," Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe's annual conference.

Zuckerberg said on a podcast last week that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections with other people than they currently do -- and that AI friends are a solution.

"The average American I think has, it's fewer than three friends, three people they'd consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends," he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.

On a separate podcast with media analyst Ben Thompson, Zuckerberg continued: "For people who don't have a person who's a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI."

When someone is making a purchase and needs to speak to a person from that business, an AI agent will be there to help them, Zuckerberg said Tuesday.

The Tuesday talk capped a media blitz that included high-profile podcasts and public talks with fellow tech executives including Collison, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. While the Meta CEO has been a guest on podcasts before, the number and quick succession of appearances was rare.

Zuckerberg has had mixed success predicting how people will interact with each other in the future. He struck gold with Facebook in the 2000s and made lucrative acquisitions with Instagram and WhatsApp a few years later. More than a decade later, in 2022, he declared that vast numbers of people in the future would interact in virtual worlds and with augmented reality. That bet has yet to come to fruition.

The Meta CEO is now throwing resources at AI chatbots -- both in its social media apps and in its hardware devices. Meta AI, as it is called, is accessible via Instagram and Facebook, as a stand-alone app and on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Zuckerberg said Tuesday that nearly a billion people are using the feature now monthly.

Zuckerberg said personalized AI isn't just about knowing basic information about a user, it's about ensuring chatbots behave as a good friend might.

"You have a deep understanding of what's going on in this person's life, " he said on Thompson's podcast.

Some people, however, aren't buying into Zuckerberg's vision.

"The very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now posing a solution to the loneliness epidemic, " said Meghana Dhar, a former Instagram executive who thinks AI friends will only make such problems worse. "It almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman."

Meta has allowed chatbots on its apps to offer a full range of social interaction, including "romantic role-play," even with children, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Stephen Schueller, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, said AI chatbots cannot fully replace friends or therapists but there are circumstances where the bots might be helpful.

"Most people don't have access to a therapist," he said. "So for them, it's not chatbot versus therapist. It's chatbot versus nothing."

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 07, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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