The Information briefing newsletter

Sep 28, 2026 The Briefing By Martin Peers Supported by Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe to our reporting here. Greetings! Mark Zuckerberg is on a roll. Fresh off his triumphant rollout of the Muse personal agent, he signaled his commitment to selling AI to companies by announcing the poaching of CJ Desai, MongoDB’s CEO, as head of a newly created Meta Enterprise Platform business. Desai has had a long career in enterprise software, at companies including ServiceNow and Cloudflare before MongoDB, making him a significant hire. We still don’t know exactly how expansive Meta Platforms’ ambitions are for enterprise. Will Zuckerberg use some of its data center capacity to go into the neocloud business? Zuckerberg’s announcement—and Desai’s own background—suggest Meta is more interested in selling AI agents and software to businesses. Whatever the case, Zuckerberg must have made a good case to Desai about the scope of his ambitions. Desai only joined MongoDB last November, and presumably he wouldn’t have bolted without a very good reason (and/or a big paycheck). It’s a pity he couldn’t have negotiated a better title than chief enterprise platform officer, however. Desai’s hiring certainly sends a message. As Gil Luria, an analyst with D.A. Davidson, said on The Information’s TITV on Monday: “To make sure that we realize how serious [Zuckerberg] is, he hired a CEO of a publicly traded company to lead this business.” By (journalistic) law, we have to mention that Meta has tried and failed before to sell products to businesses, such as its ill-fated Slack competitor, Workplace, which got shut down a couple of years ago. Clara Shih, whom Meta hired from Salesforce to run a new unit selling AI tools to businesses, left after a year. Still, let’s not write off Meta in this arena. After all, it generated $114 billion in the first half of this year selling ads to businesses, including many large companies. That gives it a starting point for its AI services business. It’s always easier to pitch to a business when you already have a relationship with them. Both Google and Amazon have pursued that approach. We wrote in 2022 how Amazon has a group called the Pan-Amazon team that tries to persuade its cloud customers to buy advertising and other products from different parts of the company. Google, which is dominant in advertising but not so much in cloud, has also packaged the two services together. Now, whether this works for Meta may depend on how it’s done. Meta’s AI salespeople probably shouldn’t call the marketing people the ad team deals with. That might confuse the marketing people at the would-be client and make the company look like a bunch of amateurs. Meta’s biggest challenge is that it is jumping into a very crowded market. Not only is there a host of enterprise software firms and big cloud companies trying to sell different kinds of AI services to businesses, but AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI are doing the same thing. Meta is dominant in social media advertising: It will find selling AI to businesses a much, much more competitive operation. MongoDB’s Shock Meanwhile, Desai’s departure for Meta certainly isn’t so great for his former employer MongoDB, seeing as Desai only took the reins of the cloud database firm last November. Mongo stock plunged 19% on the news, which prompted the company to bring back Desai’s predecessor as CEO, Dev Ittycheria, as interim president and CEO while it looks for a permanent replacement. The board may have a short list to go back to, actually, as it hired Desai after what it called a comprehensive search. Desai’s decision to jump to Meta after such a short time at MongoDB wasn’t popular with some folks around the latter company, judging from online reaction. One former MongoDB staffer made this oblique post on X clearly aimed at Desai, telling him, “Enjoy your time…selli