More than 60 per cent of people on WhatsApp in India message a business app account every week and revenue from “click to message ads” in India has doubled year-over-year, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

During the company’s quarterly earnings call, he said that business messaging will be the next major pillar of the company’s business.

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“There are more than 600 million conversations between people and businesses every day on our platforms. To give you a sense of what this could look like when it’s scaled globally, every week now, more than 60% of people on WhatsApp in India message a business app account,” Zuckerberg told analysts late on Wednesday, as Meta registered $34 billion in revenue in its third quarter, up 23 per cent from the same quarter last year

Zuckerberg said that revenue from “click to message ads” in India has doubled year-over-year.

“I think that this is going to be a really big opportunity for new business AIs that I talked about earlier that we hope will enable any business to easily set up an AI that people can message to help with commerce and support,” he mentioned.

Last month, Zuckerberg announced a new feature in India that will allow WhatsApp users to pay businesses using a variety of payment options, including all supported UPI apps, debit and credit cards, and more.

The company partnered with online payment solutions provider PayU and Bengaluru-based Razorpay to add support for payments via credit and debit cards, net banking and all UPI apps in India.

According to him, most commerce and messaging is happening in countries where the cost of labour is low enough that it makes sense for businesses to have people corresponding with customers over text.

In those countries like Thailand or Vietnam, there’s a huge amount of commerce that happens in this way, said the Meta CEO.

“But in lots of parts of the world, the cost of labour is too expensive for this to be viable. But with business AIs, we have the opportunity to bring down that cost and expand commerce and messaging into larger economies across the world. So making business AIs work for more businesses is going to be an important focus for us into 2024,” he noted.