From the beaches along the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes this week, Meta has launched a new AI chat feature designed to help businesses communicate with customers on Messenger.
These new tools will make it easier for customers to purchase products and get customer support. It also revealed business messaging tools to create, organise and send paid marketing communications on Messenger.
Based on Meta’s Llama 3 large language model, the new Messenger tool allows the AI to reply to the questions that businesses receive most often in the channel, as well as respond to customer messages about products in “engaging and natural” ways.
“AI for business messaging is a true game changer. It handles hundreds of basic inquiries from our customers swiftly and accurately. This automation saves at least 20 per cent of customer support costs and significantly helps us focus more on growing our business,” said Franco B. Ongkingco of White Coat Manila, which has been putting the tool to use.
Select businesses can get started by sharing information about themselves and their Meta product catalogue in the Meta Business Suite. These chats can be initiated through a click-to-message ad, organically or the “Send Message” button on a business’s Facebook Page.
Customers always request to message with a person and businesses can also manually jump into the conversation at any time.
Meta has also given select advertisers the ability to create, organize and send paid marketing messages on Messenger, using Ads Manager, to people who have opted-in to hearing from them.
Finally, it announced a suite of new features for Threads – the Instagram-based Twitter rival it launched to much fanfare last year. These new features are powered by the Threads API which it is opening up to businesses and creators. The new features include the ability to authenticate, publish posts, and fetch their own content via the API; management capabilities allowing businesses and creators to retrieve and engage with replies to their posts, set reply controls and hide or unhide specific replies and media and account-level insights, such as the number of views, likes and replies.
