On Wednesday, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced that users holding personal account on the popular chat app can now convert them into business accounts at a fee. This will enable users to list information such as a location and opening hours, which may benefit small cafes and shop owners.

Among other business features are organization of chats using color labels, automated greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for a quick reply. Speaking to his channel, Durov said that Telegram planned more business features this month, including a means of integrating AI-powered chatbots for customer service.

"Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to a completely new level," he said.

This feature and others like that are meant to gain challenge WhatsApp Business, which broke the 200 million mark of active monthly users last year. But on the bright side, Telegram charges subscription fees for business features, as WhatsApp generating revenue depends on the type of conversations and frequency of the chats.

Meta-owned WhatsApp introduced a host of business-facing features during last year, such as personalized customer messages and flows to complete e-commerce transactions without leaving the app.

With premium subscriptions, a self-custodial crypto wallet, and auction of premium usernames, the messaging app is focusing on augmenting its business over the last two years. The chat application with over 800 million users worldwide is also planning to launch the ad platform within this month with a revenue-sharing program for channels.