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“From WhatsApp’s perspective, a core principle we follow is that anything has to be reliable and private. Anything that invades our privacy does not have any space on the platform. Our expectation from the businesses is that they have explicit permission before they reach out (to users),” Srinivasan said.
She spoke to a select group of reporters virtually before the start of the company’s flagship event Conversations scheduled to start in Brazil on Thursday.
Business messaging, particularly on WhatsApp, has seen explosive growth in countries like India. Globally, more than 200 million small businesses have deployed and are using Meta’s suite of business messaging services and are at a “multi-billion-dollar annual run-rate” for the company, she said.
The number of conversations between users and small businesses using Meta’s range of business messaging services has doubled over the last year in India as well, she said, adding that so far, some transit and transportation service providers such as Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai Metro, as well as the Delhi Transport Corporation had successfully deployed these tools for users.
“Other key sectors where we see great adoption and use cases are banking and finance, healthcare, automobile, as well as retail fashion and beauty,” she said.
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The social media conglomerate also plans to add a calling feature for business messaging to enable users to talk directly to a human representative to complete more complex transactions, Srinivasan said.
On Thursday, Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg also said that the AI assistant feature for business messaging will be launched with a small number of English-language businesses in India and Singapore, to begin with.
“Starting today, our new optimized delivery tools will help businesses build on the strength of our AI systems to deliver the right message to the right person on WhatsApp,” Meta said in a press release.
Key features
- Meta to roll out calling feature for business messaging
- Co aware of spam messaging, will use AI tools to tackle problem
- AI assistant feature will be rolled out for a few businesses in India from Thursday
- Number of conversations between users, businesses doubled from last year
- More than 200 million small businesses use Meta’s suite of business messaging services.