Meta’s WhatsApp Introduces New AI Tools for Businesses

Meta announced on Thursday that it’s introducing new AI tools for businesses on WhatsApp at its annual business messaging event in Sao Paulo, Brazil. One aim is to increase revenue from the popular messaging service by introducing targeted ads, which are integral to the business models of Meta’s other popular apps, Facebook and Instagram.

In a video presented at the event, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains that the new AI systems can define and recommend the ideal group of recipients to target with relevant promotional material and updates. Previously, these were sent out en masse to anyone who’d opted in to receive a business’s marketing material.

Businesses can now “use ads manager to deliver messages to those customers who are most likely to be interested … this means that businesses are going to see better ROI, and people will see more relevant messages,” he said.

“This [targeted approach] is very important for business because they are paying for those messages,” WhatsApp’s head of strategic markets, Guilherme Horn, told Reuters. Reportedly, the new tools will rely on user data harvested from Facebook and Instagram as long as the same phone number has been used to register all accounts.

Meta also announced that it is testing a new AI chatbot to help businesses improve customer support by answering common questions and suggesting products customers might like, similar to AI chatbots used on product websites. Adding to that, Zuckerberg envisions building a future with specialized AI assistants with specific knowledge about a particular product, service, or topic.

“Our vision is not just to build a single AI assistant, but also to enable lots of different AIs that can serve different purposes, including for businesses,” he said.

A joint report by Meta and Bain & Co. further highlights the potential of utilizing AI for customer interactions, citing India as an example. According to it, AI-powered assistants could transform conversational commerce in the country by enabling multilingual, multimodal, and, most importantly, human-like conversations.