Meta Announces Speakers and Agenda for Next Week’s ‘Conversations’ Business Messaging Conference

Meta’s holding its first ever ‘Conversations’ business messaging conference next week (5/19), where it will showcase its latest innovations and coming upgrades for its messaging platforms, which now cumulatively have over 2 billion users.

And it’s bringing out the big guns for the event, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’ll deliver the main keynote address, along with COO Sheryl Sandberg and Uber chief Dara Khosrowshahi.

I mean, that makes sense, Uber has essentially built its business on messaging, and Sandberg will sit down with Khosrowshahi to get his insights into how messaging platforms have facilitated Uber’s growth, and fueled its connection strategy.

In other sessions, Meta’s internal engineers will discuss the latest messaging upgrades and business tools, which will likely include new eCommerce integrations and advanced ad tools for WhatsApp.

Meta’s been trying to generate more revenue from WhatsApp since it purchased the platform for $19 billion back in 2014. Those efforts have forced Meta to gradually change the focus of WhatsApp, and in some aspects, soften its privacy features, which is at least part of the reason why former WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum left the company back in 2018.

But at 2 billion users, WhatsApp presents huge revenue potential, if Meta can get it right.

It’ll be interesting to see if it has any new solutions on this front to share next week.

Following the keynote presentations, there’ll be a range of breakout sessions and deep-dives, covering topics like ‘How to get started with messaging to support your customers’, ‘Building conversational commerce experiences’ and ‘Working with Meta’s partner ecosystem’.

It could be worth tuning in to glean some more insight into how messaging can complement your business process.

You can check out the full Conversations agenda here where you can also register to attend the single day event.