Last year, he mentioned in Q3 2023 earnings call that he was using AI to get business accounts to answer customers for purchase and support queries. Today Meta announced AI-powered features for the WhatsApp Business apps, such as assisting in creating click-to-WhatsApp ads and generating responses for frequent customer messages.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the tools at Meta Conversations, the company's new conference in Brazil today, where he revealed that aside from building consumer-facing bots on its platform, the company wants to build AI agents to help businesses in their conversations with customers.

Now, our vision's not just to build a single AI assistant but also to enable lots of different AIs that could serve a lot of different purposes, including business. 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 may also leverage AI to create ads on Facebook and Instagram to initiate a WhatsApp chat with a business.

The firm is also testing AI-fueled customer support; the responses will be fully automated to customer queries which are about catalog or very frequently asked questions. As of now, the firm is testing this ability to a limited set of merchants in India and Singapore; Brazil is next on its list.

Meta said it would also clearly mark AI-generated messages so customers know they are not speaking to a representative of the company.

The company further discussed using AI to automatically send messages to a selected subset of people rather than all customers who have opted to receive updates from a business. According to the company, this is now when its Ads Manager will automatically suggest audiences who might be receptive to receiving messages other than updates about their orders.

For example, Meta's business partners for WhatsApp API already include RelianceJio's Inerakt, Tiger Global and Fidelity-backed Gupshup, and Peak XV and Shopify-backed Wati. While these companies already offer some of those tools through their WhatsApp-based CRM (customer relationship management) solutions, Meta's tool is free and the company is targeting potential merchants who do not want to bother with buying additional tools.

The vast opportunity for scaling conversational commerce via generative AI-powered assistants was noted by Meta and Bain & Co. in a joint report. According to the report, "In a country like India, these tools can make consumer conversations more multimodal, vernacular, and intuitive.".

The company has now given away these tools for free at most of the revenue Meta generates on the WhatsApp Business platform: businesses talking to customers more often. With these new AI tools, it will look to increase that number.