Facebook’s parent company offers a range of consumer AI products like Meta AI, as well as internal tools for employees.
The AI tool was first previewed to employees a little over a year ago and was tested on small groups, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported last June. The tool is called Metamate, a possible reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s brief attempt to give nicknames to the company’s employees. According to Heath, the tool uses company data to assist employees with tasks like summarizing meetings and debugging features.
Its existence has been known for over a year now, and Meta employees have been seen speaking about it publicly.
Meta product director Esther Crawford, who famously slept on the floor during Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, touted the AI tool in a post on X Saturday, saying she uses it “all the time to be more efficient” and that companies without their own in-house AI tools are “already behind the times.”
In response to the post, Crawford added that the tool “has a lot of functionality,” including the ability to summarize documents, explore metrics and visual data, create queries, and update project status.
Mehta did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment before publication.
Crawford’s post about Metamate appears to have sparked an online debate about the use of in-house AI tools at Meta and other companies.
One user whose Threads profile lists him as an AR design prototyper for Meta replied to Crawford’s comment, sharing how the tool has improved his own performance:
“Metamate has improved my performance review by pointing out accomplishments I had overlooked,” a user said. “It also generated code for me faster than I could have typed it out myself.”
Shopify’s chief operating officer, Kaz Nejatian, cited Crawford’s post on X and said he “100% agrees.” The company said in January that its in-house AI tool, called VaultBot, answers “approximately 32% of our engineering questions.”
Big banks and consulting firms have been rolling out similar services for their employees in recent years as companies look to improve overall performance with personalized AI tools.
Last September, consulting firm EY announced it was investing $1.4 billion in AI to develop its own large-scale language model, EY.ai EYQ, which will power its in-house chatbots. Announced Last April, the firm said it would invest $1 billion in AI-related services over the next three years, and KPMG said it would invest $2 billion a few months later. AI and Cloud Services for the Workplace For five years.
Other consulting firms, like McKinsey, are also developing entire AI divisions for their own businesses. McKinsey acquired QuantumBlack in 2015 and it now employs about 2,000 data scientists and serves as McKinsey’s AI hub.
Banks are following the same path: Goldman Sachs recently announced plans to roll out a suite of generative AI tools to its employees early next year, and JPMorgan also recently rolled out its own in-house AI assistant, powered by OpenAI.
Other big tech companies are also developing internal AI tools alongside their consumer products. For example, Google’s internal AI model, Goose, helps employees write code faster. One technology program manager at the company said the various AI tools are transforming daily workflows and helping with risk management and administration.
While approaches vary from organization to organization, it’s clear that large companies are moving toward adopting AI. Bain & Company, 85% of 200 U.S. companies with revenues of $5 million or more listed AI adoption as a top five priority.
Companies also reported spending an average of $5 million per year on generative AI, with one-fifth of the companies surveyed saying they were spending more than $50 million per year on the technology.
