Last year, during the company's Q3 2023 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about leveraging AI to help business accounts respond to customer purchases and support inquiries. Today, Meta announced AI-powered capabilities for the WhatsApp Business app, including helping create click-to-WhatsApp ads and generating responses to frequently sent customer messages.
Mark Zuckerberg announced the tools today at the company's Meta Connect conference in Brazil, where he said that in addition to building consumer-facing bots on the platform, Meta wants to build AI agents to help businesses talk to their customers.
“Our vision now is not just to build a single AI assistant, but to enable a range of AIs that can be used for different purposes, including business. Any business should be able to quickly stand up an agent that can converse with customers, provide support and facilitate commerce,” he said.
WhatsApp Business users will now be able to create AI-powered Facebook and Instagram ads that can start WhatsApp chats with businesses.
The company said it is testing AI-powered customer support that will automatically answer customer queries about its catalogue and frequently asked questions. Currently, the social media company is testing the feature with select retailers in India and Singapore, and will expand to Brazil soon.
Meta said it plans to make AI-generated messages clear so customers know they're not speaking to a company representative.
WhatsApp also talked about using AI to send messages to a subset of people who have signed up to receive updates from businesses, rather than all of their customers. The company said that going forward, its ads manager will suggest relevant audiences who may be receptive to receiving messages beyond updates about their orders.
Meta's WhatsApp API business partners — RelianceJio's Inerakt, Tiger Global and Fidelity-backed Gupshup, and Peak XV and Shopify-backed Wati — already offer some of these tools through their WhatsApp-based CRM (customer relationship management) solutions, but Meta is offering its tools for free, aiming to target retailers who don't want to go through the hassle of purchasing additional tools.
There is a huge opportunity to scale conversational commerce with generative AI assistants, said a joint report from Meta and Bain & Co. In countries like India, the report noted, these tools have the potential to transform consumer conversations into more multimodal, everyday and intuitive.
While Meta is offering these tools for free, the main driver of revenue on its WhatsApp Business platform is businesses having more conversations with their customers, and the company hopes its new AI tools will help increase the number of those conversations.