OpenAI: Meta is in a spot of bother as ChatGPT comes to WhatsApp

OpenAI’s launch of a WhatsApp account may put pressure on Meta’s own AI assistant that, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had earlier said, would aim to become the world’s most used consumer chatbot.However, OpenAI’s move to foray on WhatsApp would impact Meta AI’s reach, especially in markets such as India, Brazil and Mexico, which are among the largest user bases for WhatsApp and the mainstream communication medium for businesses.

“On WhatsApp, we continue to see promising signs of retention and engagement, which have coincided with India and Mexico becoming two of our largest markets for Meta AI usage,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, VP of GenAI at Meta, wrote in a blog post last week.

He added that Meta AI is on track to be the world’s most used AI assistant by the end of the year, with nearly 600 million monthly active users, presence in 43 countries, and the use of a dozen languages.

However, ChatGPT’s foray into WhatsApp could limit Meta AI’s growth, experts believe. Last week, OpenAI announced the global rollout of ChatGPT’s WhatsApp account 1-800-CHATGPT (or 1-800-242- 8478).

“Meta has an enviable distribution moat thanks to the popularity and huge installed base of its consumer apps,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished VP analyst, Gartner.

“However, ChatGPT continues to be the most popular conversational AI chatbot due to its higher accuracy, multi-modality and extensibility. While the usage of Meta AI may grow within the apps (such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook), OpenAI still has a huge mindshare and impressive paid customer base as a general purpose and versatile chatbot,” he said.Even though ChatGPT has launched a WhatsApp Business account, it may not become a revenue source for Meta. This is because ChatGPT conversations are user-generated and Meta does not charge for such conversations between users and businesses.

However, experts believe Meta may tweak its model to create a separate category for bot conversations in order to squeeze revenue from such new-age accounts which are not meant for business queries but only chat.

“WhatsApp offers a public API to all businesses who want to communicate with customers,” said Aniketh Jain, founder of cloud communications company Fyno. “But the customer does not incur any cost for chatting with businesses. Therefore, in case of ChatGPT, every query made by the customer will not incur any charge for the business,” he explained.

“However, these new AI chatbots are a grey area and do not exactly fit in WhatsApp’s model of business messaging which falls in four buckets – service, utility, marketing and authentication. I believe Meta will pivot their strategy to address this evolving category,” Jain said.