Meta starts an enterprise AI business and hires MongoDB's CEO

Meta on Monday, September 28, set up a business to sell its AI to companies, and hired the chief executive of MongoDB to run it. In a note posted by the company, Mark Zuckerberg called Meta Enterprise Platform "the next major pillar of our business", and said CJ Desai would join as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, reporting directly to him.

MongoDB, the database company Desai had led, said he had stepped down "effective immediately" and brought back his predecessor, Dev Ittycheria, as interim chief executive. Its shares fell 14% in premarket trading, Reuters reported. Quartz put the fall at 25% and said Meta's own stock slipped about 4%.

What Meta says it will sell

The note is short on detail. Meta says it will bring "our full technology stack, including the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers". It names no customers, no prices and no delivery dates.

Some of the pieces already exist. Muse, Meta's personal agent, began rolling out in the US on September 8. Muse Code is a coding agent for the terminal, and Meta's developer API for its Muse Spark model is listed at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, according to Runtimewire. The same report notes a cheaper Contributor tier that "permits Meta to use prompts and completions to train future models". That clause will get a close reading in every corporate legal department. Enterprise pricing has not been set out.

Zuckerberg's pitch rests on a combination few rivals have: "advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses". The last item carries a lot of weight. Meta's business relationships are overwhelmingly with advertisers, and Runtimewire points to Meta's statement in June that more than a million businesses were already using a Meta Business Agent on WhatsApp and Messenger.

Why Meta wants a second business

The numbers explain the urgency. Meta's revenue in 2025 was $200.97 billion, and $196.18 billion of it came from advertising. That is roughly 98 cents of every dollar.

So what changes now? Cloud companies can rent out the computing they build for AI. Meta, so far, has turned its AI spending into money mainly through better ads. The likelier reading of Monday's move is that Zuckerberg wants a second way to earn a return, by selling agents and models straight to companies. Desai is the kind of hire you make when you mean it. Before MongoDB, the note says, he led product and engineering at Cloudflare and spent nearly eight years at ServiceNow, including as president and chief operating officer.

Why MongoDB's investors reacted so sharply

A chief executive who leaves mid-quarter, less than a year into the job, usually signals trouble. Desai took the MongoDB role in November, Reuters noted. MongoDB moved quickly to head off that reading. Its board said it had retained an executive search firm, and the company reaffirmed its guidance for the third quarter and for fiscal 2027. "MongoDB's business is strong," said Tom Killalea, the board's chairman.

The market was not fully persuaded, and it is easy to see why. Ittycheria knows the company; he led it for 11 years until 2025, according to Quartz. But investors had priced MongoDB partly on a new leader's plans, and those plans have now walked out of the door.

Who gains, and what to watch

For Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, which already sell models and agents to companies, Meta is a new and well-funded competitor, though not yet a finished one. It has published no enterprise prices, contracts or security terms, which are the first things corporate buyers ask for. For businesses, another supplier should mean sharper prices, provided the data terms are acceptable.

The next signals are concrete. Watch for the first named enterprise customers, whether the Contributor-tier training clause carries over into enterprise contracts, and who MongoDB picks as its permanent chief executive.