WhatsApp's turned itself into a search engine and checkout.
- Lucy
- Jul 7
- 6 min read
A month ago, WhatsApp’s head of product did a private roundtable ahead of Meta’s Conversations keynote. I wasn’t in the room, but I watched the recap from a few creators who were (@graceandrewsss did the best breakdown), and they spoke about the preview of someone voicenoting WhatsApp to ask for the best cookies near them, getting a recommendation, asking about flavours, then ordering twelve, paying, and having them arrive via Deliveroo. All without opening a single other app besides their WhatsApp AI chat.
It looked brilliant, but I also (wrongly) assumed it was a “someday” kind of feature that they were working towards and would be released with only a few trial businesses soon. I went back to client work and forgot about it entirely.
Then last week, mid-rush to a Barry’s gym class, my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp notification asking if I’d like to reserve a username. In the midst of trying to work out if I had time to pick up a bottle of water en route, I blocked an hour in my diary for when I got back, because this was very much part of the same thing I’d already decided wasn’t urgent, and clearly was.
I didn’t necessarily have that hour to spare, but this is the exact trap so many of us find ourselves in. We’re building for the business we have right now, when the world is moving too fast for that. Ground-breaking updates for businesses are happening each month, and it’s easy to feel that unless you’re at least 3 steps ahead, you’re behind. So I spent that hour doing the research, and now I’m working through what we all actually need to do about it.
This isn’t a messaging update
You may be inclined to file this under the simple fact that WhatsApp has added a chatbot, which is something seemingly every business on the planet is doing right now. But this is so much more than a chatbot.
WhatsApp have launched three key new features: a genuinely capable AI agent, a way for customers to find you inside the app without you messaging them first, and a username system that makes your business searchable by name.
In short, WhatsApp is turning into your new search engine. But instead of directing you to a website or third-party app, they’re setting themselves up to deliver the end-to-end experience for their 3 billion users.
So what are the updates?
At the Conversations keynote in London on 3 June, Meta introduced Meta Business Agent: a free AI agent built directly into the WhatsApp Business app. This tool can learn from your existing chats, your catalogue, and your website. It answers questions, recommends products, books appointments, qualifies leads, and hands off to you when it should. Setup is supposedly under 10 minutes, so they’re making it a no-brainer for businesses.
Plus, it’s actually already been running in India, Mexico and Brazil for nearly two years, with over a million businesses on an early version before this went global.
For larger operations, there’s the Meta Business Agent Platform, which integrates with Shopify, Zendesk, and hundreds of other systems, offering more enterprise controls and customisation. Deliveroo, the car rental company Movida, and the Turkish marketplace Trendyol (300,000 merchants deep) are already building on it. If that’s you, this is all worth an even closer look, but I’ve primarily focused on the bits for small to medium-sized businesses for now.
Then there’s discovery. WhatsApp is rolling out the ability for customers to search for a business by name directly in the app’s search bar or via a shared contact card. Layer that on top of the new username system (launched 29th June, first country wave live from 7th July), and businesses now get a proper, searchable handle inside WhatsApp itself. Discovery is changing so potential customers can find you the same way they’d find you on Google.
Quick flag, because my first question was on pricing (we’ve all seen the horror stories of businesses accidentally spending their entire annual budget on an AI tool), it’s not free forever. WhatsApp isn’t super forthcoming with pricing, but from what I can understand, service-based and utility messages are free (basically, responding to a customer). For marketing and sales messages, token-based pricing (roughly 4 to 5 American cents per message) starts on 1st August, and ordinary human replies within the service window will be charged again from 1st October. Plus, I’m assuming if a user makes a direct payment within WhatsApp for Business, the business will be charged a standard transaction fee.
Your business AI Chatbot can only answer what it’s trained on.
My second question was on scoping: Meta banned general-purpose, open-ended AI chatbots on WhatsApp back in January. Your agent has to be scoped to a specific job (bookings, product questions, order support), not built to answer anything literally. And an agent that’s only allowed to answer specific, well-defined questions is only as good as the information you give it.
Meta’s own guidance is relatively blunt about this: the agent should recommend only what exists in your catalogue, and shouldn’t invent stock, discounts, or delivery times for which it doesn’t have data.
Which means the businesses whose agents perform well won’t be the ones that set it up fastest, but the ones that set it up best. You need tight, specific, and complete information that’s well thought through, rather than something generic. I fear there’s a real trap of small businesses using AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to set up this AI chatbot, but if you’re only inputting information that users themselves can get through other tools, then there’s no incentive for WhatsApp users to engage with your business chatbot. And it’s likely they won’t have a strong experience when using it. You need to really think through the information you’re using to train it.
So what does this mean for businesses?
The beauty of big corporation AI tools is that your primary focus can be on making your own bits really good, rather than worrying too much about the tool itself. Meta has its (many) faults, but tool usability is normally not one of them. So if you’re looking to use this, and you should, there are four main things for you to do:
First, reserve your username. If you do it quickly, it can match your social handle, making it as easy as possible for customers to find you.
Get your catalogue and FAQs genuinely complete before you switch anything on. If your product list is half updated or your delivery policy lives in your head rather than being written down anywhere, that’s the gap your agent will fall into. This is unglamorous admin work, and it’s also the entire game.
Decide your handoff rules. You can tell the agent exactly when it should step back and let you take over: a complaint, a discount request, anything sensitive. Set that deliberately rather than discovering the hard way what it should have escalated. Whilst this is still quite a new tool, I’d say it’s best to overestimate what it should hand off, and you can gradually increase the bot’s responsibility as it learns even more about your business and how you handle situations.
Prioritise your end-to-end user experience. Similarly to what I said in reaction to the latest Google releases, you need to make your business as easy as possible for AI agents to use. That means having call-booking systems, appointment-booking systems, easy checkout options, and general customer service processes in place so that your AI agent can easily direct customers (or their AI agent) through them. If you’ve not properly mapped out your end-to-end customer journey and fixed any gaps before, now really is the time to do so.
What’s next for businesses?
The world of business currently feels a bit like a snow globe that’s being picked up and shaken every week. It’s easy to stay buried under the flurry and never try to get above the surface, but when we’re seeing huge names like Google and Meta release fundamental changes for business discoverability, within weeks of each other, hiding is no longer an option if you want to be successful.
The good news is that, with all these updates, the businesses that will be found by an AI agent in 18 months time won’t necessarily be the ones who simply reacted in the first week it fully launched (i.e. this week), but the ones who put the effort into really nailing those basics to ensure their customers usability is as easy as possible.
So are you building for the way people find your business today? Or the way customers will find you in three months’ time?
Want to read more about the recent Google announcements and what you need to be aware of? Check out this article:
