Last year, during the Q3 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg talked about leveraging artificial intelligence for business accounts to respond to customers for purchase and support inquiries. Today, Meta announced AI-powered features for its WhatsApp Business apps, such as helping create clickable ads on WhatsApp and generating replies to frequent customer messages.
Mark Zuckerberg announced these tools at the company’s Meta Conversations conference in Brazil today. He noted that in addition to building consumer-facing bots on its platform, Meta wants to build AI agents that could help businesses in their conversations with customers.
“Now, our vision is not just to create a single AI assistant, but to enable many different AIs that can serve different purposes, including business. Any business should be able to quickly support an agent who can talk to your customers, provide support and facilitate commerce,” he said.
WhatsApp Business users will be able to leverage artificial intelligence to create Facebook and Instagram ads that can start a WhatsApp conversation with a business.
The company said it is testing AI-powered customer support, which will automatically respond to catalog-related or FAQ-related customer queries. The social media company is currently testing this capability with select merchants in India and Singapore, and will soon expand to Brazil.
Meta noted that it plans to clearly indicate AI-generated messages so customers know they’re not talking to a company representative.
WhatsApp has also talked about leveraging artificial intelligence to send messages to a subset of people rather than all customers who have signed up to receive updates from a business. The company said that now, its Ads Manager will suggest suitable audiences that may be receptive to receiving messages beyond updates about their orders.
Meta’s business partners for WhatsApp API like RelianceJio’s IneractTiger Global and Fidelity with Gupshup and Peak XV and Shopify support Watt already offer some of these tools through their WhatsApp-based CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. However, Meta offers its tools for free and tries to target traders who may not want to deal with purchasing additional tools.
In a joint report, Meta and Bain & Co. said there is a huge opportunity to scale conversational commerce with AI-powered assistants. The report noted that in a country like India, these tools can make consumer conversations more multimodal, vernacular and intuitive.
While Meta offers these tools at no cost, its main revenue driver on the WhatsApp Business platform is businesses that have more conversations with customers. With new AI tools, it will hope to increase the number of these conversations.
