It was on last year's Q3 2023 earnings call that Mark Zuckerberg spoke of leveraging AI to let business accounts respond to customers themselves for purchase and support queries.
The tools then being announced are a new set of AI-driven functions for WhatsApp Business apps that offer help around creating click-to-WhatsApp ads and generating answers to common customer messages.
Mark Zuckerberg announced these tools at Meta Conversations, the company's conference in Brazil. He said that aside from building bots facing consumers on their platform, Meta wants to build AI agents that could help businesses in their conversations with the customers: "Now our vision is not just to make one AI assistant but also to enable lots of different AIs to be able to do other things, including for businesses.
"Any business should be able to quickly stand up an agent that can talk to your customers, provide support, and facilitate commerce," he said.
WhatsApp Business users can create Facebook and Instagram ads using AI that can automatically start a WhatsApp chat with a business.
The company said it is testing AI-powered customer support, automatically answering customer queries related to the catalog or frequently asked questions.
Currently, the social media company is testing this ability with some chosen merchants in India and Singapore, while the scope will be expanded soon to Brazil.
Meta noted that it plans to denote clearly when it's an AI that has created a message so customers know they're not communicating with a company representative.
WhatsApp also said how, with the help of AI, messages could be sent out to a subset of people other than just all customers who have signed up with a business to receive updates.
The company said that now, its Ads Manager would start recommending relevant audiences that may be open to receiving messages beyond what their orders entail.
The tools are already on offer from the business partners of Meta for WhatsApp API, including Inerakt, invested in by Reliance Jio, Tiger Global, Fidelity, Gupshup, Wati, invested in by Peak XV and Shopify, among others. Though Meta offers its set of tools free, it is eyeing those merchants who do not want to go through the purchase hassle of tools.
In a joint report, Meta and Bain & Co. said there is a huge opportunity to scale conversational commerce with the help of generative AI-powered assistants.
It noted that such tools can make consumer conversations more multimodal, vernacular, and intuitive in a country like India.
While Meta offers such tools at no cost, most of its revenues on the WhatsApp Business platform come from businesses having more conversations with customers. With those new AI tools, it will be hoped that many more such discussions can happen.
