Meta has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-based customer service assistant for businesses on WhatsApp worldwide. Called ‘Meta Business Agent’, this AI tool will help small and medium businesses manage customer service, sales management and other activities. At the same time, the company has also announced plans to charge for this service in the future.
TechCrunch reports that Meta announced on Wednesday that its customer service-oriented AI bot is now being rolled out globally on WhatsApp. Earlier, WhatsApp Business had been testing AI agents for nearly two years in countries like India and Mexico.
According to Meta, Meta Business Agents can answer various customer questions, recommend products, book appointments, and vet potential buyers or sales-related leads. If human intervention is required in answering a query, it will also have the facility of forwarding it to the concerned staff member. Apart from WhatsApp, this bot can also be used on Instagram’s Direct Message (DM) service.
The company said some new features are being tested to make the AI agent more effective. This includes providing daily summaries and analytics of customer chats. The feature is currently being tested on selected accounts in WhatsApp Business, Instagram Pro, Messenger and Meta Business Suite.
Meta also said that in the future, AI agents will be empowered to conduct market research, highlight product features, manage users’ calendars, and gather and analyze information about competitors. Apart from this, when users search for a business or share contact information in the chat, agents can bring relevant businesses to the fore.
Meta is also working on creating a separate platform for large enterprises. Through this, organizations can create custom AI agents according to their needs. These agents can be connected to various commerce systems like Shopify, Zendesk and Shopee.
Meta sees AI agent services as a new source of revenue. Meta Business Agent will be included in certain tiers of WhatsApp Business Premium subscriptions, the company said. Large enterprises have to pay according to the amount of tokens used for using agents.
The move to Meta is believed to be critical to WhatsApp’s business strategy. This is because the platform has so far mainly generated revenue from business messaging services and ‘click-to-WhatsApp’ advertising. Now the company is trying to strengthen its position in the market of business related software and automated services by adding AI based services.
