Is WhatsApp the new front door for AI Agents?
The quiet disruption coming to business messaging... and I'm not sure folks are ready for what comes next
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Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around digital wallets, Personal AI and digital customer relationships.
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Hi folks,
This week’s deep dive is about the quiet, but massive shift happening right now around customer messaging.
Because there’s a new interface coming, stitched into the fabric of your everyday digital life: business chat. It’s getting a major upgrade, but not from a UX designer, or a new CRM platform.
Rather, it’s from an AI agent.
The obvious question we urgently need to ask: great, but who controls it?
In today’s post, we look at the future of business messaging. It might not be headed where you think. And you need to be paying attention.
We dig into:
Today’s fragmented customer channels
Zuck’s new revenue engine
When brands ruin our conversations
Another data gold rush
Who else is listening?
The future of customer experience is being written in chats
So go make a fresh pot of peppermint tea, pull up a chair, and Let’s Go.
Before we dive into the details, we need to set the scene on ‘customer engagement’. Because when you break it down, there are only four main ways for a business to talk to a customer:
Apps
Websites
Emails
Messages (SMS, WhatsApp and social media)
I’ve written much more about these four channels and their issues here. As a quick reminder:
Apps and websites are ‘pull’ channels. The business builds something and waits for you to show up. They ask you to log in, authenticate, and then offer you content and features behind a login screen.
Emails and messages are ‘push’ channels. The business reaches into your personal space to interrupt you. Sometimes with relevant updates, but more likely with grubby sales fluff.
Each channel has its own logic, and its own limitations.
Apps are clunky to build and expensive to maintain. Websites give us repetitive strain injuries and can’t cope with the ‘unhappy path’. Email is overrun, and is awful for retrieving stuff. And SMS is untrusted, transactional and spammy.
Full house.
But we’re not here to keep beating the ‘we need a new channel’ drum. Rather, we need to look closely at what businesses are now doing to fix these problems, using their existing digital channels.
And specifically what’s happening with WhatsApp.
Because META is quietly changing how businesses interact with customers. And it’s a big deal.
Zuck’s new revenue engine
Enter ‘WhatsApp for Business’.
In a recent keynote conversation with Stripe’s John Collison, Mark Zuckerberg spelled it out plainly:
“Every business today has an email address, a website, and a social media presence. In the future, every business will have an AI Agent that lives in messaging platforms. That’s going to turbocharge everything.”
And Meta is betting the farm on it.
And why wouldn’t they? Messaging is the most intimate, immediate channel we use. Yes, in many countries, people under 25 only use WhatsApp if they are forced to, for awkward family chats and managing their next work shift.
But for many, WhatsApp is where their social conversations happen. And by many, I mean MANY. As of March 2025, WhatsApp had three billion monthly active users. And that’s a 50% increase in only 5 years, up from 2bn monthly users in March 2020.
That’s astounding.
WhatsApp is unlike email, which you only scan. It’s unlike apps, which you rarely open. Instead, messaging is where things happen. And if you’re Meta, with billions of users, it’s also where your next $10bn in revenue is coming from.
WhatsApp for Business already boasts over 500M daily active users, and last year generated over $1.7 bn. Now Zuck tells us that this channel is getting even bigger, and fast. And that it’s going to drive his next wave of global growth.
But what’s changing isn’t just the business model. It’s the interface. The relationship. And the expectations.
Soon, every brand will come with a chatbot… and every chatbot will be powered by an AI agent.
These won’t be the brittle, frustrating bots of 2023. These will soon be real-time, LLM-powered agents with access to your purchase history, preferences, and context. They’ll sit directly inside WhatsApp, ready to handle sales, support, bookings and customer follow-ups.
Imagine texting your airline to change a flight, and getting an instant response that checks your ticket. It offers new options, and processes the switch without breaking the chat thread.
Convenient? Incredibly. Efficient? Absolutely. Unprecedentedly intimate? Also that.
I now wonder if this is a different type of customer shift. A fundamental one. Changing where customer conversations live.
When brands ruin our conversations
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve already seen the cycle. What starts as a peer-to-peer and personal channel for chat, soon becomes:
A new unique customer identifier to add to CRM (think email address, phone number, social media handle)
A new channel to reach those customers
And if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll also know that brands screw up that channel pretty fast. Service updates. Sales messages. Predictive spam. Always interuptive.
And it’s predictably awful:
Email was for friends and colleagues, then brands showed up and spoiled the party. We soon were forced to add spam filters and junk-mail folders to handle the tsunami of crap.
Facebook was for family and friends, then brands showed up and killed the feed (On average FB gets 1.1% clickthrough… meaning one in a hundred eyeballs actually click on an ad (many accidentally)… and that’s before the brand then hopes to maybe get 2% of the 1% actually making a purchase…)
SMS was for mobile chat, then brands showed up with misguided and misplaced offers, One Time Passwords, and a forest of dodgy links
Instagram, Snapchat and X… have all gone the same way
Which is why we customers have had to move elsewhere for our personal chats. Moving over in droves to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
Private spaces. Personal chats.
Given that WhatsApp is owned by META, it has held the line for longer than most predicted. And for many, it’s become a useful place for actual conversation. Friends. Families. Local groups. Team planning.
But the dam had to break.
Brands are now moving in, and they’re not coming alone. They’re bringing AI agents, CRM integrations, and end-to-end workflows. You guessed it, you can go and buy the t-shirt.
WhatsApp for Business is now getting the same treatment:
A new unique customer identifier for businesses to add to CRM
A new channel to reach those customers
And you know where this ends up. Because brands will screw up this channel pretty fast, just like they did the others. Service updates. Sales messages. Predictive spam. And always interuptive.
But there’s another, ugly underbelly to all this.
Today, your personal WhatsApp messages are ‘end-to-end encrypted’ (‘E2EE’). No one can see what you chat about, except you and the other person or group you chat with. And boy, is that helpful for Meta, who is now spending $MM promoting the only privacy story they have, and (ironically for everyone paying attention) championing ‘E2EE’.
A (PR) job well done.
But what most folks miss is that Meta still gets the Metadata (you’re welcome).
Meaning they can see who you talk to, when, where and how often. And when you link those signals across Facebook and Insta, you get a pretty rich picture of most people, doing most things.
3Bn people, to be precise.
Who knows who. Who contacts who. When and where and how.
And why? Because People Who Like This Like That. Great for advertising. Natch.
But here’s the hidden twist: With WhatsApp for Business, the contents of your chats aren’t private.
Not only can the other side see your messages… so can Meta. It opens a door to a whole new category of customer data harvesting. And I don’t use that word lightly.
It’s certainly a new category of customer channel. One where context is king. And one where AI - and the AI’s owner Meta - is the broker.
Another data gold rush
Remember, when you interact with a business on WhatsApp:
You’re not filling out another form on their website
You’re not emailing them about a support issue
You’re not checking your order in the app
You’re having a conversation. One that reveals tone, urgency and sentiment. And one that might include sensitive information.
“I need to change my delivery time because my father’s in hospital.”
“Can I get an exemption on this policy, I’ve been made redundant?”
“Can you help me split this payment over two cards?”
These are more than conversations. And they are more than new data points. They’re new rich customer signals. And Meta knows exactly how to monetise signals, baby.
Now let’s dial it up a little:
Add in CRM integrations (so the conversation can draw on your transaction history, your preferences, your account information and products)
Include payment details and card-on-file (so you can be up-sold, cross-sold in the channel… one tap and kapow)
Integrate your digital ID (so they can know it’s really you, and can embed KYC into those flows and product processes too)
Drop in some AI agents with memory (so they can fetch, update, remind, notify, reserve, check out, confirm and audit all those conversations)
Suddenly, WhatsApp becomes more than a messaging platform. It becomes a mini-operating system for a brand to handle customer relationships.
But unlike a company’s own app… the platform here belongs to Meta.
Who else is listening?
But there’s more.
Because when a company integrates WhatsApp for Business via API (which will be almost all of them), they’ll likely use third-party service providers to manage the API. Which means it’s not just Meta that can access the conversation.
It’s every 3rd party in the stack.
This is more than a cute footnote. It’s a fundamental privacy issue. Because your sensitive conversations aren’t just between you and the brand. They’re potentially visible to any infrastructure provider, analytics platform, and AI agent-in-waiting.
Now, will customers care? Possibly not. At least not at first.
Yes, it’s already in the T&Cs. But hey, who cares! People crave convenience. If you can message a brand and get an instant refund, who’s worrying about the backend? If an AI agent can fix your late delivery problem without making a call, folks are not reading the terms of service.
Just like we didn’t with Gmail. Or Facebook. Or Instagram.
But the trade-off is real, and the intimacy is deep. Yes, Google scans your emails. But it’s more of a delivery channel for information. Not a conversation.
But WhatsApp? That’s a place people talk. Certainly today.
And it’s going to make business messages feel different. More direct. Perhaps even more personal. And when AI joins the party, the line between support and accidental surveillance starts to blur (and don’t get me started on MCP and privacy).
The future of customer experience is being written in chats
In the rush to automate customer service, there’s a real risk we’re about to rebuild much of the customer stack inside messaging apps.
We’re not talking enough about who owns that stack. Or what it means when every business runs its front desk through Meta.
This is way beyond the shift to clumsy chatbots. It’s about:
New interfaces for customer control
New architectures of data capture
New dependencies on private platforms
The future of customer experience is being written in chats. And the pen, increasingly, is in the hands of AI agents.
Empowerment Tech - and specifically digital wallets powered by Personal AI - holds much of the same promise as WhatsApp for Business.
Access to personal data, rich customer signals and real-time context. Reusable digital ID, verified payments and loyalty. Account information from other places, plus reputation, history and preferences. And much more.
But in contrast to WhatsApp, ET will be more intelligent, more private, more secure, less spammy, and critically, more trusted than Meta.
Unfortunately, it’s going to take longer than a few months to get to 3Bn monthly active users. And we know how businesses are going to act when given the WhatsApp for Business option.
So this is your first wake-up call. The one that I’m hoping you don’t snooze.
Folks, let’s not sleepwalk into yet another enshittification of yet another digital channel.
Even if it’s convenient.
OTHER THINGS
There are far too many interesting and important Customer Futures things to include this week.
So here are some more links to chew on:
News: Google opens up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ tech to promote privacy READ
Post: Agentic Commerce And Payments, Money And Identity, AIs And APIs READ
Article: Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps READ
Paper: How autonomous should your AI agent really be: Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents READ
News: Retailers can now embed AI shopping agents into their Shopify stores READ
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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