Meta Hopes Third Time's the Charm With Meta Enterprise Platform

Four months after Meta officially turned the lights out on its Workplace from Meta collaboration platform, the company announced its re-entry into the enterprise market with Meta Enterprise Platform. 

The company is bringing in former MongoDB CEO Chirantan "CJ" Desai to lead the new offering. Before taking the CEO role in November 2025, Desai was COO and president at ServiceNow and had previously led product and engineering at Cloudflare.

The 225-word announcement (348 if you include CJ Desai's statement) was short on details, but shared the immediate objective: "Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack, including the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code and more" to businesses and developers. Zuckerberg touted the company's work with businesses, specifically referencing how it helps them "reach customers."

The work of reaching customers through advertising isn't the same as fulfilling enterprise needs. The company's track record of shutting down its enterprise efforts — Horizon Workrooms and Workplace from Meta — should be enough to give any enterprise pause, said ClearBox Consulting founder Sam Marshall.  

"Enterprises want to know what support will be there for the long term if they are to invest heavily in a technology," Marshall said.

Has Meta Learned Anything About the Demands of the Enterprise?

Meta's metaverse and Workplace failures stemmed in large part from an underestimation of how different the enterprise market is from the consumer. When Meta announced Workplace's closure, Julien Codorniou, who had been VP of Workplace, described Meta's initial entry to the enterprise market as an "accident," adding, "You can't do enterprise SaaS as a side gig."

Both solutions suffered from a similar blind spot, Lithos Partners co-founder Sharon O'Dea told Reworked. "[They] started with Meta’s idea of how people ought to interact, rather than how organizations and their employees actually get work done." 

When that track record is applied to AI, which is embedded in workflows and business processes across the organization, the stakes become higher, she said. "Enterprise buyers aren’t just buying what a product can do today; they’re making a bet on whether the vendor will still care about it in five or ten years."

"I don’t see any signs that Meta truly understands the enterprise world," Deep Analysis founder Alan Pelz-Sharpe told Reworked. Meta Enterprise Platform wouldn't make it past a compliance-oriented, risk-averse IT department, he added. 

The enterprise difference is the "boring enterprise plumbing," said O'Dea. "Where the data goes, who can see what, how it plugs into identity and systems of record, what admins can control, and who carries the risk when it gets something wrong."

On the Heels of the Muse Agent Launch 

Today's announcement comes soon after the company's Sept. 8 launch of the Muse personal AI agent. The product shot to the top of Apple's App Store soon after its launch, and was followed by reports of security and privacy problems. Inc. columnist Jason Aten tested Muse, only to have it suggest a column topic based on a private conversation with his podcast co-host that the agent did not have permission to access. Security researcher Patrick Wardle reported a zero-day vulnerability in Muse's Mac app that let malicious code already running on a user's computer hijack the agent, exposing dictated audio, account tokens and connected services. Meta patched it within 16 hours. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform.

Meta's own documentation states that the current Muse architecture "does not prevent Meta from accessing data when necessary to support, secure or operate the service." In today's announcement, Desai specifically linked to that page, noting "As with Muse, security and privacy are built into Meta’s enterprise products from the outset."

Yes, this is the consumer version of Muse. But Meta named Muse as part of the enterprise stack, so its consumer privacy record is fair game for buyers.

"Businesses want to collaborate with providers they can trust, and Meta’s reputation for respecting the data of its users has repeatedly been questioned," Marshall said. 

Meta Isn't the Only AI Company Trying to Break Into the Enterprise

Meta isn't alone in its enterprise ambitions. OpenAI announced its entry into the enterprise space — independent of its partnership with Microsoft — in 2023. Anthropic followed a year later with its launch of Claude Enterprise in September 2024.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic provide definitive numbers around their enterprise customers. OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser said in April 2026 that more than 40% of the company's revenue came from enterprise business. How it defines "enterprise business" is less clear. In a November 2025 blog post, the company heralded its 1 million business customers, saying the number includes "all organizations that actively pay OpenAI for business use—either through ChatGPT for Work, or through direct consumption of our models through our developer platform."

Anthropic's figures are just as opaque. In a September 2025 post, the company shared it "now serves over 300,000 business customers, and our number of large accounts — customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue — has grown nearly 7x in the past year."

Pelz-Sharpe warned against reading too much into any success stories the two share: "OpenAI and Anthropic are hemorrhaging money at scale, so we still have no idea if they will eventually succeed as enterprise vendors." 

Workplace also counted Fortune 500 firms including Walmart, Starbucks and Chevron in its customer base before it closed.

Meta will also be competing against two companies with a strong foothold in the enterprise: Microsoft and Google. 

"Meta will need to put considerable work into reassurances around data security and the ability for its customers to exert governance over how the AI is utilized and the guardrails around the LLM. This ... will make their proposition a more challenging sell than, say Microsoft’s Copilot," Marshall said.

The Road Ahead for Desai

Desai's hire suggests the company is taking this newest entry into the workplace more seriously. The company had previously moved internal employees up into the leadership roles for Workplace and Horizon Workrooms. Desai appears to be the first outside enterprise software executive Meta has recruited to lead one of its enterprise efforts.

"He understands enterprise technology, long buying cycles, security and the fact that big enterprise deals are generally won in the decidedly unsexy bits between the demo and deployment," said O'Dea. "The more interesting question is whether Meta lets him build an enterprise business on enterprise terms."

The announcement makes it sound as if Desai is starting with a near-clear slate in terms of specific enterprise offerings. "Meta Enterprise Platform will focus on turning its AI stack into products and services that companies can deploy for their own businesses," he stated in the announcement.

Desai's remit goes much farther than building products and services. Pelz-Sharpe echoes O'Dea, saying he will have "to design, build and recruit a true enterprise software company." Desai will also have to convince enterprise buyers that the company is committed to the enterprise market for real this time.

Editor's Note: The article was updated on Sept. 29 to include feedback from Sharon O'Dea.