In order to make money from the popular chat service, Meta has launched its first ever AI-powered ad targeting program for businesses on WhatsApp. On Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced these tools at a conference in Brazil through a video.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp is known for its privacy features and it avoids targeted advertising. But this does not mean that it cannot change; infact it already has been changing for some time now. “Business messaging” tools were introduced by WhatsApp a few years ago which allowed commerce and payment features like customer service or marketing support where users could send messages to all people who had opted in.
However, with the help of new AI tools businesses will be able to send messages that are tailored according to user’s behaviour on Facebook and Instagram (if they are using the same phone number). This means that they can target their ads more cleverly which will lead in more users responding thereby making their ad spending cost-effective.
Meta has always tried finding ways of earning more money from its most-used app; WhatsApp but so far nothing much has changed despite it being bought at $22 billion in 2014 which was quite expensive considering how little revenue addition it brought about.
The head of strategic markets at WhatsApp, Guilherme Horn said that if used correctly these AI tools would enable advertisers get better results because they would only be sending ads to people who are likely to respond thereby making such campaigns more efficient.
Another thing that was done during this conference was introducing an AI chatbot whose main role is handling business inquiries with the aim of automating business communications within meta platforms. It works just like other AI powered customer service platforms where users can ask it things like opening hours or find catalogs etcetera.
Besides all these features mentioned above; another one involves adding Brazil’s PIX digital payment method into whatsapp among other services provided by them like money transfers or purchases which are similar to those offered by pix itself according their usage rates last year being 39% of all transactions made in brazil.
Source: investing
