When Salesforce software engineer Jayant Tyagi wants a quick answer from ChatGpt, he doesn't mind opening the app or heading to the browser.
Instead, he fires a voice message at ChatGpt in WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging service owned by Meta.
“I'm already an avid WhatsApp user, so it makes sense to visit ChatGpt instead of installing yet another app,” he told Business Insider. “It's very fast.”
Tiaggi is not alone. Recently, WhatsApp has become a quiet place where users from all over the world have been talking to multiple rival AI chatbots like Openai and Prperxity, and are located alongside Meta's AI.
WhatsApp, which is used by more than 3 billion people worldwide, is “the biggest surface people use in meta AI,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's April revenue call. The app is also becoming AI free, with rival chatbots currently attracting attention inside.
As WhatsApp will become one of the most important battlefields in consumer AI, that competition can make it difficult for meta AI to become the default option for billions of users the company wants to win.
“Many people find WhatsApp a natural and convenient place to explore AI,” Meta spokesman Vispi Bhopti told BI.
Bhopti added that over 1 billion users on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram use meta AI, but WhatsApp continues to see its most powerful usage.
“We believe that people try multiple AIs and choose the right one for them,” Bhopti said.
Openai, which became available for ChatGpt on WhatsApp late last year, said the move is part of a broader accessibility mission.
“We continue to reduce barriers to new people in AI to experience the power of this technology,” an Openai spokesperson told BI.
The Perplexity chatbot, launched on WhatsApp in the spring, has now processed over 1 million queries a day on the app, a spokesperson told BI. The demand for WhatsApp bots was so strong that they crashed temporarily at launch.
“Perplexity's WhatsApp bots have seen unprecedented demand, which is far beyond what we expected,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted a month ago.
Openai and Prplexity plug into WhatsApp
Rival chatbots plug into WhatsApp via WhatsApp Business Platform. It's a service that allows large companies to send messages to those who want to pay meta and receive them, and which companies will net over $1 billion a year, Bhopti said.
This means that all businesses can run chatbots on WhatsApp just by paying Meta. No formal partnership is required. In fact, it's opening the door for rival AI companies to leverage WhatsApp's large global audience without the need for a clear blessing of meta.
Its reach is especially valuable in emerging markets. WhatsApp has around 100 million users in the US, but its footprint is much larger in countries like India and Brazil, often the main gateway to the Internet.
Connecting to WhatsApp allows companies like Openai and Prperxity to increase their presence in these markets without having to convince users to download individual apps or sign up for new services.
“The users don't think they're 'monetable',” a confused spokesperson told BI. “We consider them to be people with questions. Our mission is to answer questions at any time. Users choose to upgrade to Prplexity Pro for many reasons, but that's their choice.
For users, WhatsApp is becoming an AI marketplace where chatbots from various companies are attracting attention within the same app.
Users can simply save official numbers in their mobile phone contacts (1-800-chatgpt – convenient!) and start chatting to reach both ChatGpt and confusion in WhatsApp. No sign-up is required. Both allow users to ask questions, generate images, and interact with audio notes.
“Using these bots directly on WhatsApp feels more natural compared to texting your smart friends compared to texting your smart friends,” Sumit Gupta, San Francisco-based concept engineer, told Bi.
Both bots are restricted to one-to-one chat. Meta AI, on the other hand, can directly draw into group conversations, but this is still an important advantage.
“I use a lot of meta AI in my group to generate memes and create polls,” Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukuri, engineering manager at Microsoft, told BI. “But if you want something more creative like Ghibli-style images, I'll go to ChatGpt. I still trust Perplexity's search the most.”
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WhatsApp has unexpected benefits
WhatsApp has long been a breeding ground for misinformation. Now users are turning the app's AI chatbot into their own true team.
Vootukuri said he would pull Meta AI into group chats, particularly in the politics that arises from conversations, to group chats with “Bust Fake Videos.” Perplexity CEO Srinivas highlighted the LinkedIn trend earlier this year, urging them to forward false information to Perplexity's WhatsApp chatbot and immediately give them a fact check.
A Perplexity spokesperson told BI that the company introduced the feature because “WhatsApp is particularly struggling with misinformation through forwarded messages.”
AI chatbots via WhatsApp also work on flights. Many airlines have restricted WiFi in flight to basic messaging apps, and ChatGPT and bewildered bots run entirely within WhatsApp, allowing users to easily access the air, as they posted on social media.
For power users, mixing and matching chatbots within WhatsApp have become a second nature.
“I use a lot of meta AI to paraphrase messages and casual things that don't care about accuracy,” Manas Paldhe, software engineer at Infinitus Systems, told BI. “But if you want a more search-based approach, such as getting a link to a news article, I look to the baffling. For serious writing and deeper work, I'll still go back to ChatGpt.”
This kind of flexibility can make it difficult for the meta to lock users into their own assistants.
For now, users seem happy with the growth of the in-app AI mix. After all, the best chatbots are what get the job done no matter where you live.
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