The One Thing That Matters For Investors From Facebook's F8 Developer Conference

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) announced at the F8 Developer Conference that the Messenger app was now open to natural-language chatbots that were designed to handle all types of customer service queries.

Jefferies’ Brian Pitz maintained a Buy rating on the company, with a price target of $145.

Although the announcement had been widely expected, Pitz pointed out it was still “an important milestone as Messenger continues its march towards monetization.”

The analyst mentioned Messenger now had 900 million users and that together, Messenger and WhatsApp users sent about 60 billion messages per day, three times the number of global daily SMS messages.

“Chatbots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages,” Pitz mentioned.

What Zuckerberg Said

According to the Jefferies report, while introducing the features of the Messenger chatbots, Zuckerberg also said we were “at the beginning of the golden age of online video,” with users now being able to broadcast videos directly through Facebook’s “Live” video service.

Zuckerberg also highlighted the company’s 10-year roadmap, including three main areas of focus of “1) connecting everyone online, 2) artificial intelligence (AI), and 3) Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR).”