As chief privacy officer of Meta, Erin Egan has a challenging role. Leading the privacy and global policy operations for the biggest social networking platform in the world has always been a complex job, with the company’s platforms frequently coming under the scrutiny of regulators globally over their handling and use of personal data.

But with generative artificial intelligence becoming mainstream in the past few years, it feels like the stakes have ratcheted up a notch.

“We are in a moment of a technological revolution akin to the revolution we had with the internet in the 1990s,” Egan says.

There is opportunity here for companies, that much is clear. Meta has big ambitions when it comes to AI. The Facebook owner is aiming to integrate the technology into hundreds of millions of businesses, bringing the benefits of AI to companies that might otherwise have missed out.

And it is spending big to do it, investing billions in the technology in 2025 alone as it builds data centres and expands its capacity to handle what it expects will be a surge in activity.

If chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vision is realised, AI could be used in the future for everything from creating advertising to preventing loneliness in society.

The company already has close to a billion active monthly users for its AI technology, and it is continuing to develop open-source models – dubbed Llama – although the latest version, Behemoth, has reportedly hit a snag in its roll-out that could delay it by a few months