WhatsApp has been a game changer for India’s small businesses: Sandhya Devanathan

Since 2022, Meta has been focusing heavily on business messaging on WhatsApp, nearly two years on — what do you think has worked or not worked for you?

I have always maintained that WhatsApp has been a game changer for India’s small businesses. So Meta always wanted to remain invested and focused on the small business space because they will be transformative for the country in terms of the economic value they will bring. In business messaging, we have launched a slew of features over the years. We have done a lot of skilling. So if you take a look at “payments” which Mark announced at Conversations last year, I can tell you for a fact that we have doubled the number of payments being done on the platform in the last six months. Going forward, I think GenAI will open a lot of possibilities for businesses in terms of bringing consumer support or helping in creatives. So, on that front we have announced GenAI assistance and GenAI agents. GenAI agents are currently being tested in India, GenAI assistance will be first piloted in the US, Singapore before we bring it to India. 

Meta has enabled many new features to bring forth cross platform operability, where users can discover businesses on one platform and interact with said businesses on the other. But what can meta do to enable, discovery, interaction, and payment on one single platform?

There is always more to be done, I don’t think we have reached the goalposts in terms of what we want to build on the platform. But there are encouraging signs, such as payments doubling on WhatsApp, or businesses seeing improved operations from business messaging. More and more users are finding it much more intuitive to interact with the business within the app instead of leaving. We are pretty encouraged by these results.

What do you envision AI agents to be as a product?

WhatsApp AI agent continues to be in its pilot phase. Our hope and expectation are that businesses will be able to have all the support that they need from an AI agent within WhatsApp. Every business can turn to an AI tool that will help them run the business better and grow their business. Obviously, all of this will be done within the context of WhatsApp.

Do you see Meta-verified on WhatsApp to prevent scams and frauds on the platform?

I think it has more to do with businesses wanting to have a faster way to build trust with their users by furnishing the right kind of documents to get verification. I cannot comment specifically on whether frauds or spams are increasing or decreasing but we are taking the necessary steps to address that. For instance, we are actively training businesses to not needlessly spam users with content, especially as the festive season is on the horizon. Similarly, we have reporting mechanisms for users to block and report suspicious businesses as well.

Aside from small businesses can you speak in detail about your partnerships with larger businesses.

We are doing bigger partnerships, such as our collaboration with Max Life on payments front. But I will give you a few more examples that are also exciting. We launched the ability to book tickets on WhatsApp for Bangalore metro a while back. Since then, 6 out of 9 metros have introduced ticketing through WhatsApp. We also have DTC on WhatsApp. So far, we have done 6 million ticketing transactions where our previous target was 2 million, so that is exciting.