Meta ’s WhatsApp will deploy artificial intelligence tools to tackle the growing instances of spam messages and unsolicited communication from businesses, said Nikila Srinivasan , the company’s vice president of business messaging . “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. Advt 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, auto.
