Meta announced its first Artificial Intelligence-driven ad targeting program for businesses on WhatsApp at a conference in Brazil, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg presenting the changes in a video shown at the event. The move signals a clear push to monetise WhatsApp more aggressively, even as the messaging service continues to promote end-to-end encryption and privacy features. Reuters reported the launch and noted that Meta described the updates as part of a broader effort to make businesses´ paid messaging more effective.
The new tools will let companies that already use WhatsApp´s ´business messaging´ send more targeted outreach by drawing on behaviour from facebook and instagram, when users have the same opted-in phone number across those accounts. Previously businesses could send broad blasts to opted-in users. Now, targeting will aim messages at customers most likely to engage, so firms can get better value for messages they pay for. WhatsApp´s head of strategic markets, guilherme horn, told Reuters that optimising delivery to receptive users is ´very important for business because they are paying for those messages´.
Alongside the ad targeting, Meta unveiled an AI chatbot to handle common business inquiries directly inside chat. The bot is intended to help with routine tasks such as finding product catalogues and checking business hours, acting as an early test of Zuckerberg´s plan to encourage companies to outsource parts of their customer communications to automated tools. short interactions could be automated; longer ones can be passed to human agents.
Meta also said WhatsApp will add brazil´s instantaneous payment system, PIX, to its payments tool in the country, where PIX accounted for roughly 39% of transactions last year. The company has experimented with payments integrations elsewhere, including offering rival providers in india. Despite being Meta´s largest app by daily users, WhatsApp so far contributes only a small share of the company´s revenue, which helps explain why the firm is increasingly layering commerce, payments and artificial intelligence features onto the chat service.
