#130: Nicola Mendelsohn CBE, Head of Global Business Group, Meta: “Get messy with the tools.”

0:00If you're not using AI as a business leader, you should, you're behind. So you need to put in the work to start to do that. If you're not communicating with your consumers through messaging, you should, you'll be left behind. And if you're not building towards an agentic future, you should, because you'll be left behind.

0:22What an incredible honor it is to attend Meta Conversations 2026 at the historic Methodist Central Hall in the heart of Westminster. This two-day event brings together 1 ,500 business leaders from around the world with a huge focus on enterprise AI and especially the future of business messaging. Meta have announced major new products, including Meta Business Agent, Business Discovery on WhatsApp, and the new Meta Business Agent platform, which could be a game changer for a lot of organizations. The buzz around this event is palpable. There's a real sense of excitement in the room about where AI is heading and how organizations can really begin to move beyond simple chatbots towards AI-powered agents that can genuinely drive business outcomes.

1:12Most notably, I have the opportunity to sit down with a brilliant Baroness Nicola Mendelson, CBE, head of global business group at Meta. We actually nearly did a podcast a couple of years ago, but for whatever reason, it didn't quite come together. So I was absolutely delighted when this opportunity arose. Nicola is incredibly busy through the event. And so we really get grateful that she is able to take a full 30 minutes to sit down with me and discuss the new WhatsApp for business capabilities, the major announcements from Meta Conversations 2026. And of course, enterprise AI adoption and how organizations can navigate the challenges around data, governance and readiness as AI becomes increasingly embedded in the workplace.

1:58This is a very special episode of the Tech Leaders podcast from Central Hall in the heart of Westminster. This is Baroness Nicola Mendelsohn.

2:16So we are recording this from Meta Conversations in London. I am absolutely over the moon to be joined by the one and only Nicola Mendelsohn. Ingleson. Nicola, how have the last two days gone from your perspective? Well, first of all, Gath, it's amazing to be here with you. Thank you for being at the Great Hall in Westminster here together. It's been action packed, so busy. We've had over 2000 of our clients and partners and agency and friends coming in through the doors to learn about all things messaging and all things business agents as well. And we've had millions, literally millions of people that have been tuning in on the live stream as well.

2:55So all I can say has been action-packed. I think everyone's going to leave a bit exhausted, but very elated. Absolutely. And yeah, there's definitely a buzz of excitement around here, which is quite evident and quite inspiring, actually. And it feels like it's an exciting time, especially for Meta, but generally speaking as well. I just wanted to pull you up on something there. What an incredible location. Did you pick this location? It's a fab idea. It was not my choice of location, but once I knew about it, I was really excited. All credit there goes to our international marketing team for finding it.

3:29Yeah, absolutely. This was a lot of history with this building. I know it was the first year when the United Nations Council was held here. And it was actually set up as a building to basically talk about societal change. And societal change is something that is happening right now as a result, partly because of technology innovation. So it's a very apt location for where we are right now. But Nicola, for the listeners who are not familiar with yourself, could you give us a little bit of an introduction of yourself, why you got into the tech sector and also why you joined Meta and how the last couple of years have gone with Meta?

4:02Yeah, sure. Happy to. So my name is Nicola Mendelsohn. I run the global business group at Meta and I actually do that now from New York. I moved over four years ago there. I've been with the company almost 13 years in a couple of weeks' time. I originally joined as the vice president of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And as I said four years ago, I came five now, I think, to run the global business. I've always been obsessed with technology from as far back as I can remember, originally as a gamer, and then more and more about how it works in marketing and advertising. So before I joined Meta, I had 20-something years in advertising.

4:43working at agencies like Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Gray, and then latterly my own business, Karma Rama, before I came here. Fantastic. So going on to this event then, what are the key takeaways that you've wanted the attendees to walk away with at the end of the two days? Well, there's a few actually. So we've been doing conversations for a number of years now, and it's really been all focused around all things messaging. Across the Facebook and Meta a family of apps and services, we have over three and a half billion people that are coming onto our platforms every single day. This is a huge number of people.

5:18Oh, absolutely. And so we see with WhatsApp now that has three billion monthly users on it. There's always been a clamor to go, when are we going to be doing more with WhatsApp? When are we going to be doing more? And we've been doing a lot for small businesses around the world. And one of the things that we announced over the last couple of days is that there's now a million different businesses that are using our meta business agents all over the world. And they're using it to connect to their customers, to have 24-hour service, to be able to, you know, to have really rich and deeper conversations with them.

5:52But one of the big things we announced is that Meta now is here to help service enterprise organizations as well with all things business agents. So that's huge. And we have a platform now to allow them to be able to do that. And we're moving from a world where it's not just AI that could respond in a sort of a trope fashion to basic standard questions to more an agent that can actually act on behalf of the business that's being offered out there. So this is a really exciting step change that we've seen. And the last two days have been peppered full of lots of examples from different partners, different clients getting on stage and saying how messaging now is really where customers and consumers are.

6:36And if you want to be where they are, then you need to be engaging, especially on WhatsApp. Absolutely. So you're taking this step into the enterprise space. I'm saying you're partly there already, aren't you? But I know you're taking a big step into it, especially at the moment and accelerating in that direction. But can you tell me what kind of differences in terms of the product? What kind of things have you had to change in order to cater to that audience? And what have been the challenges from moving from an SMB product, you know, essentially into an enterprise product? Yeah, well, obviously, it's a lot more complicated.

7:09You're working with big multinationals that are going across different jurisdictions, different countries. And it requires a different level of infrastructure, different layers that you need to bring in. There's obviously a big role here for our partners that we work with as well, that we've been working with for many years. And there's been a whole tract here as well around that area. But also it's in terms of what the resources that we have internally that we're bringing in, because it does require us to behave differently than just the way in which we've been on the ad side of the business.

7:41So, yeah, it's a pretty big change, but it's a really exciting change all the way, you know, from Mark and the board to all the people at the company. We're all very energized by this moment. So for those who are not familiar with the event and the announcements today, could you just summarize the major announcements from the two days? Yeah. So I think the biggest one is that Meta's all in on enterprise. Absolutely. The business agents now are available to be deployed across larger organizations. And we haven't been able to do that before. That we now actively have over a million advertisers and that there is now a platform for not just us, but for others to build on as well, which is really exciting because you're going to want the agents to do so many different things.

8:21And we're building that toolkit as we speak. We're flying and building planes as we speak, but so are others as well that can help those businesses out there that are envisaging an agentic future. Look, messaging has always been very big for us as a company. It's a multi-billion revenue business for us. But I think the thing now what we're seeing is that if you really want to connect with where consumers are, where people are, people are on messaging. They don't have as much time perhaps to go into lots of different apps all the time, but you can get them where they are in WhatsApp and that you can do so many things.

8:53And we're seeing that already all over the world. If, you know, I travel a lot in my role, I'm in Singapore, I'm in India, I'm in Brazil. It's a way of life to do business on WhatsApp. It doesn't matter what type of business you're in. You can be in the financial industry, you can be in the clothing, you can be in beauty, you can be in automobile. People expect business to be done, answers to be given, service to be given on where they are on WhatsApp. And we've seen actually that, you know, Europe has been behind in this area. And so I think there's a real opportunity for European businesses.

9:25And we've seen, we've had a lot of conversations with our customers from the European countries over the last couple of days to say, yes, you are behind. Let's be honest, you are behind today. But if you just look at where even the UK has been in the last year, the UK has, I think, trebled the amount of businesses that are coming on. So you can get there very quickly. So in the way that countries like Brazil and India maybe have taken many years to get to the point that they are today, with the tools, with the infrastructure that we're now putting out there, actually, it's pretty easy to get on board and to start the conversations directly in WhatsApp.

9:59Yeah. Well, that's really interesting. So I was going to ask you about that, actually, Nicola. You said about Europe is a little bit behind because we're a small business. I use WhatsApp all the time for business purposes, albeit not a specific WhatsApp for business product. But of the million companies you said who use WhatsApp for business, what kind of percentage are we talking in Europe then? Is it predominantly North America, South America, places like that? And Europe, is it quite a small percentage or what is the split? I haven't got the specific breakdown, but I don't think it feels like a way of life here.

10:33Yeah. Why do you think that is? I think we've been slower to adopt it on this side of the planet. So my encouragement to people out there listening is, you know yourself that you're using it. You know your consumers are using it. Go and meet them where they are. It was a good example that we had the CIO of Turkish Airlines was on the stage today. And he was talking about the fact that 50 % of his passengers actually are new to the airline. And so they're not going to download the app. But he still wants to be able to communicate with them, either to give them a boarding pass or to let them know about maybe there's a friction event that's happened, etc.

11:10So, you know, he's gone all in. He said this is not a thing. And he was very specific, like not a thing to do incrementally. He just really believes that that's where the future is. And then when you bring messaging with agents together, that's when you can actually even turn friction moments into loyalty moments. And that's a fantastic thing to think about in terms of how you can really enhance customer loyalty. Yeah, for sure. It's an amazing way for them to interact with their customers on a platform that they just don't have at the moment with their own app, I suppose, isn't it? So that's really interesting.

11:42So can I ask you about payments and sort of the financial element of it in terms of interacting with customers? Can you facilitate that on the platform at the moment? Are there any plans to grow that part of it? One of the number one things that people ask is like people want to have as little friction as possible because you never want to drop a sale. In some place, in some jurisdictions, it's easier than others, but that's certainly an area of focus for us. Yeah. OK, fair enough then. So in terms of companies who are using AI for business purposes at the moment, what do you say to them to flip over to the WhatsApp for Business product?

12:16What are the main benefits of using the actual product? Yeah, so there's so many different benefits, depending on what your business objective is. But what I'm really feeling, and certainly the energy around this conference is, I think the reality is that people understand messaging, and people understand agents. But actually both are enhanced when you use both together. And so you make the conversation that you have with the consumer so much richer and such a greater potential. So we also had a senior representative from PepsiCo, Johnny, was here. And he was talking about how they started an idea for the World Cup.

12:53They're a big sponsor of the World Cup. The first time, actually, they're sponsoring the World Cup. And they had this idea around watch parties, which started as a very small idea, but suddenly as much mushroomed around the world. So it didn't start global. It's now global. They now have over five million consumers on their channels, which for context is as big as or sometimes bigger than some of the really big football teams that you know about around the world. and they see this now as a really core part, not just of their marketing campaign and not just something for the World Cup, but something that's going to endure that they really have this direct backwards and forwards relationship.

13:30And we've seen that with, you know, with things like SMS, you would put a message out, but you couldn't get the message back. And that's actually quite frustrating for a consumer. Now you can have this ongoing dialogue. Yes, much richer conversations. Yeah, no, absolutely. And you started about, you know, this unique location that we're in, And, you know, we're in the heart of Westminster. It's really old London. And one of the things that I was talking about earlier was the fact that actually Westminster Hall that's been around since, well, the 11th century. By the 14th century, this was the place where people were gathering, the judges, you know, the members of the royal family.

14:05By the 14th century, it's where the merchants were as well. And the merchants were, you know, lining the walls and they would go in there and they would know you deeply. They would know your families. They would know why you were buying and all of these things. And I think over time, businesses lost a lot of that personalization, a lot of that relationship. And I think with agents, you have the opportunity to get back again and messaging the two together to really understand the consumer, to really preempt what the consumer is thinking about, build long term loyalty and build greater growth for your business.

14:37Yeah, absolutely. The one thing I do like about this is that when you are interacting with customers, you know, through the platform, you're essentially training the model for the agents. Do you know what I mean? So it's constantly progressive. And then when something, I was talking to a lady upstairs, one of your technical people about when there's a point of escalation, when the agent can't solve the problem and the human has to step in. But these get minimized over time because of the constant development of the model, which I thought was fantastic. So, yeah, in terms of that then, in terms of technical challenges of doing that, how have you found this product in terms of development from a technical standpoint?

15:18I know you're not involved in that yourself, but I'm just saying, has it been difficult to create this model, to have this continuous development element to it? Or is it sort of something that's plugged in quite well with your LLM, with the WhatsApp, the Metro LLM? Yeah. So not just within our own side of the business, but also working with the client as well and bringing in their technical aspect also. It means that we do work more with FDEs coming in to help on the business to bring the two together. I think that's a really important part of it also. Yeah. No, absolutely. That's fascinating.

15:55So I just wanted to ask you then about the other products you've talked about in the last two days. What other things have you been excited about in terms of the product releases? Well, there's so much going on at the company at the moment. I think about the fact that it's only recently that we announced the launch of MuseSpark, which is our first model out of the Meta Superintelligence lab, which was only nine months in the making. And so that's something. Yeah, it's really extraordinary. You know, Alex Wang and the gang kind of brought that together so quickly. And that really has kind of been a step change in kind of visual and in shopping.

16:29That's another aspect as well, because, again, the LLM, the models can know so much more about you to really serve up things that it thinks and can anticipate that you're going to like and that you're going to enjoy. So I think bringing all of these things together as we move more into an agentic world, it feels a really exciting time to be at Meta. One of the other examples that we've had here speaking is Movida. On this side of the planet, people might perhaps not know about them, but they're a big car rental company in Brazil. Alex Schultz, our global CMO, was joking about the fact that if you'd have told me I'd have got really excited about a car rental company coming into this conference, you know, I probably would have been a bit surprised.

17:11But it really is unbelievable. So you go into WhatsApp, you've got the number and you start straight away an intelligent conversation. Yeah. You know, I want to rent a car. I'm going to be in this city. This is the kind of car I like. Show me the availability. Show me the different price ranges. Show me the different cars. And it's really intelligent. And then if you, you know, you might get distracted, you come back. So I went back and then I was like, I'm thinking about it again. And they went, oh, we already know. We've been talking about it. You know, you were saying these were your dates.

17:40These are kind of cars. What more do you need to know? What more information? You go, that's so seamless. That's so good. And so, you know, the tech that's powering that behind is almost something that the consumer doesn't need to know about. No, of course. Because we want to make it look effortless and simple for them. Well, that's what it's all about, isn't it? That's the key to further adoption is how seamless it is. You've got to make it easy for people to use this stuff and easy for them to want to put their data into the platform. This episode was brought to you by Be Digital. Be Digital support leadership teams to optimize cost and get more out of technology investments.

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18:57I'm sure you've been asked about this before. Obviously, businesses are essentially giving you their customer data. They're giving you their data. What do you do to safeguard organizations and their data from a security standpoint? Yeah, look, this is absolutely fundamental to the kind of the heart of our company, which is we have to have trust and there has to be trust in the security around the data that companies and people are giving to us. It's why we have, you know, a head of a chief privacy officer, Michelle Prati, is in charge of all this. No products that are created on any of our platforms or in any way with any of our models have to go through very strict privacy review from the very moment, even before we start to kind of create them.

19:44And they have to go through those safe checks. They have to be signed off beforehand. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a business. So I'm actually really proud of the work that the team does in that area. Yeah. Okay. Good answer. So I wanted to ask you about enterprise AI adoption, more broadly speaking, more generally. AI for a lot of businesses at the moment is just something you put queries into, you get information back that you can act on. But the next stage of that is obviously the agentic AI, where the AI does the work for you. OK, I know your platform solves a lot of that. And it takes organizations from a LLM world into an agentic AI world, which is a different world, isn't it?

20:24Very much. But what is the biggest barriers to enterprise adoption of agentic AI, in your opinion? You know, is it governance? Is it technology? Is it people? What are the biggest barriers? I don't think there's one answer to that. I think it's a combination of all the things that you spoke about. I think it does start with the individual leader. It does the individual leader. Are they leaning in? Are they using it themselves? Do they? So you're talking about the culture. Absolutely. Do they really fully understand what it means to do this? So one of the things that I've certainly, and Mark has encouraged at our company, is that we want people to kind of get messy with the tools, you know, play with things, challenge with them, and kind of really learn and experiment.

21:03It's not something where you can get somebody else to do it for you, because I don't think you'll have as good an understanding and comprehension of what is possible. So I'm doing it not just in my work life, but I'm doing it in my personal life as well to make sure that I'm staying on top of the models. And personally, I'm pretty vulnerable with my teams. But if something hasn't gone well, I talk about it. And also I've made the time, you know, if you want to get strong on something, take the cues from the gym. You've got to go on a regular basis, get those muscles going. I'm doing, it's true.

21:32I'm doing half an hour a day of learning either by myself or with a buddy. And it's better with a buddy because you can debate backwards and forwards or you use the agents as the buddy, your claws to help you kind of solve the problems of where you might be stuck or where you're thinking of. And I think it's through that that has kind of allowed me to be able to have better depth of conversation about what my expectations are, but then also being clear about what things can be used with agents. So the clear documentation of the workflows, how you evolve that, but also where people matter and where people are going to make the difference also.

22:08No, absolutely. I love the gym analogy as well. That's a good one. But so just in terms of organizations making that shift over to Agenda AI, can we talk a little bit about governance? And do you think organizations are struggling to have the right governance in place right now from a security and trust standpoint, especially, but just governance in its own right? Is AI governance mature enough for agentic AI implementation at this point within most companies, do you think? I think that's a big absolute. I think it is in some companies. And I think in some companies, they're working towards a path where it can and will be so.

22:49Interestingly, we've seen a lot of the financial institutions moving very heavily into this area. And I kind of think if it works for the financial industry and that sector, then it should be able to work. for anybody. But I think it goes back to the previous question where there needs to be the desire and the willingness from the top to really embrace and make the shift. And I think if you don't have the kind of C-suite, you know, we had the CEO of Mavida here. We've had lots of CEOs here because they saw it, they embraced it. And I think it comes from that leadership position. Yeah. Do you think your enterprise platform will help businesses, not just in terms of interacting with customers, but interact with suppliers.

23:31So I'm talking about more of the inward facing element of running a business. Do you envisage that it being used for that purpose as well? Like, you know, so that they can get better value out of their IT investments and things like that, you know, HR and stuff like that. Is that a big part of the product as well, the inward facing elements? I love the fact that whenever we launch any new products, everybody's always, yeah, but what's next? How do you see? What do you envisage? I'm going to leave it to you what you see that we could do. And one of the things that we're certainly here on is really listening and learning from the people that we're partnering with, the businesses that we're partnering with, say, what else is it that you want?