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Meta Platforms is among the U.S. tech giants leading the race to invest in generative AI and the foundational large language models that the AI breakthroughs rely on, and it’s also taken an open-source approach to its AI development, allowing the tech innovations to be shared widely.

Those innovations are occurring rapidly. “Not just daily. It’s evolving multiple times a day,” says Clara Shih, head of business AI at Meta.

Its Llama LLMs, available to developers around the world, have been downloaded over 800 million times. Earlier this week, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said the upcoming open-source Llama 4 AI will help power AI agents, the latest trend in generative AI.

The AI agents won’t just be responding to prompts. They will be capable of new levels of reasoning and action — surfing the web and handling many tasks that might be of use to consumers and businesses. And that’s where Shih comes in. Meta’s AI is already being used by over 700 million consumers, according to Shih, and her job is to bring the same technologies to businesses.

“Not every business, especially small businesses, has the ability to hire these large AI teams, and so now we’re building business AIs for these small businesses so that even they can benefit from all of this innovation that’s happening,” she told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in an interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series.

She expects the uptake among businesses to happen soon, and spread far and wide.

“We’re quickly coming to a place where every business, from the very large to the very small, they’re going to have a business agent representing it and acting on its behalf, in its voice — the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses,” Shih said.

While major companies across sectors of the economy are investing millions of dollars to develop customer LLMs, “doing fancy things like fine tuning models,” as Shih put it, “If you’re a small business — you own a coffee shop, you own a jewelry shop online, you’re distributing through Instagram — you don’t have the resources to hire a big AI team, and so now our dream is that they won’t have to.”

For both consumers and businesses, the implications of the advances discussed by Cox and Shih will be significant in daily life.

For consumers, Shih says, “Their AI assistant [will] do all kinds of things, from researching products to planning trips, planning social outings with their friends.”

Rival OpenAI recently launched its Operator AI for tasks like travel planning.

On the business side, Shih pointed to the 200 million small businesses around the world that are already using Meta services and platforms. “They’re using WhatsApp, they’re using Facebook, they’re using Instagram, both to acquire customers, but also engage and deepen each of those relationships. Very soon, each of those businesses are going to have these AIs that can represent them and help automate redundant tasks, help speak in their voice, help them find more customers and provide almost like a concierge service to every single one of their customers, 24/7.”

The more AI does, the less people have to do, at least in traditional definitions of roles. Shih says every person must prepare now for the changes that will be coming. “There isn’t a single job that hasn’t been completely transformed by the internet and by mobile and by social media. I think we’re at the same juncture now with AI, where it’s clear that there are certain professions where AI will significantly change the job. But my prediction is that over time, AI will change every job function across every industry,” she told Boorstin.

Her advice for every individual and every company is “to learn, to experiment, to understand and to almost define what that [AI transformation] could look like for their particular job.”

“Just like in 1990 we had to learn email, we had to learn search. I think today, everyone, regardless of where they live, what job they have or want to have, needs to learn AI,” she said.

The good news? According to Shih, AI makes it easier to learn. “You can talk to it. You can literally talk to it.”

She’s been doing that herself. “Something that I often do is, if there’s long research papers, AI research papers, or there’s developments, you can ask AI. You can use Meta AI, and it’ll break it down for you. You can ask it, ‘Explain this at a ninth grade level, explain this at a fifth grade level,’ and it’ll do it. And you can kind of go back and forth. And so that’s how I learn a lot of the more complicated topics.”

The full interview with Shih is available at CNBC Changemakers and on CNBC’s YouTube channel.

This week was supposed to mark the end of compounding pharmacies making copycat versions of Eli Lilly‘s weight-loss drug Zepbound and its diabetes drug Mounjaro. Online, it doesn’t look like much has changed. 

Popular websites like Amble, EllieMD, Willow and Mochi Health are all still advertising versions of tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Zepbound. Some, like Ivim, have stopped taking new patients.

Mochi Health has no plans to stop, and neither do the four pharmacies it uses to supply patients with the medications, said Mochi CEO Myra Ahmad. The company uses a network of about 500 providers to write prescriptions for weight-loss drugs, including compounded versions. It’s betting that offering personalized versions of the drugs will keep the company out of the crosshairs. 

“It can be different dosing schedules … some patients prefer to go up in dosage much more slowly,” Ahmad said. “Some patients like to mix a number of other medications into their compounded formulations, depending on the side effects that they’re having. Some patients have side effects with any additives and brand name formulations. Compounding really opens up the door for so much personalization.” 

Amble, EllieMD and Willow didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for comment. 

Compounding is where pharmacies mix ingredients of a drug to create a specialized version for specific patients. Say someone is allergic to a dye in a branded medication or needs a liquid form and the main manufacturer only sells capsules. In that case, the patient can turn to a compounded version.

When drugs are in shortage, they can be compounded in larger quantities to help fill the gap. 

Copycat versions of Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound and Novo Nordisk‘s Wegovy and Ozempic have been widely available in recent years because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration listed the brand versions as being in short supply. 

That created a booming business for pharmacies compounding the highly popular class of weight loss and diabetes medications called GLP-1s.

But late last year, the FDA said all doses of Mounjaro and Zepbound were readily available and took the drug off its shortage list, spelling the end for mass compounding of the drug. After months of legal challenges, the FDA gave smaller pharmacies until early March to stop and larger pharmacies until this week before it started enforcing its rules.

The larger facilities aren’t allowed to compound tirzepatide at all anymore. Smaller ones aren’t supposed to make products that are essentially copies of a commercially available drug, a moniker with some wiggle room. The FDA sees essential copies as those that have a dosage within 10% of the commercially available drug or combine two or more commercially available drugs.

Mochi insists all of its prescriptions are personalized, including doses that differ from the standard Zepbound strengths. Other websites like EllieMD are advertising tirzepatide mixed with vitamin B12. 

Scott Brunner, CEO of the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, said formulations or dosage strengths that aren’t commercially available aren’t considered a copy. However, combining two drugs into one — like adding vitamin B6 or B12 — would be considered a copy under a strict reading of FDA guidance. But tweaking the dosage and adding in other commercially available drugs wouldn’t be considered an essential copy, he added.

“FDA guidance are pretty clear about what is and is not a copy,” Brunner said. “And I would say any compounding pharmacy or outsourcing facility that continues to prepare copies of tirzepatide injection after today are putting themselves in a certain amount of legal risks.” 

John Herr, pharmacist and owner of Town & Country Compounding Pharmacy, stopped compounding tirzepatide earlier this month. He didn’t want to take the risk even though his 300 to 400 patients on it have been calling nonstop to complain about losing access.

Town & Country, based in Ramsey, New Jersey, was charging patients about $200 a month — about one-fifth the list price for Zepbound and less than half the price Lilly charges self-paying patients. 

What happens next is an open question. Enforcing the ban on mass compounding of tirzepatide mostly falls to the FDA. The agency didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Lilly can try to sue companies that continue, but it hasn’t had much luck in the past. A Florida judge last year dismissed one of Lilly’s cases, saying the company was trying to enforce a law that only the FDA can. 

Ahmad, the CEO of Mochi, said she isn’t worried about Lilly taking legal action against her providers. The way she sees it, they have established patient-physician relationships with the autonomy to decide how best to manage their patients.

The next two months will be informative. Mass compounding of semaglutide — the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy — needs to stop by the end of May, according to the FDA.

Hims & Hers Health has already said it will stop selling commercially available doses of semaglutide when the time comes. Customers who have a personalized dosing regimen will be able to continue without any change, the company added. 

— CNBC’s Leanne Miller contributed to this report

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Scott Brunner’s comments.