Meta has developed a new bot – or “Business AI” – that supports small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in delivering customer service.
The AI agent will soon be available on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp as part of a free pilot.
Interested businesses can take part in the program by joining a beta waitlist.
The pilot aims to provide smaller businesses with many of the same capabilities that large enterprises leverage to “deliver great customer experiences” with AI.
Many such enterprises – including AT&T, DoorDash, and Goldman Sachs – have partnered with Meta on AI agents, leveraging its Llama AI models.
Now, SMBs may utilize the very same models to autonomously respond to customer queries.
Indeed, the AI agent will parse an SMB’s product catalogs, FAQs, and other knowledge sources to autonomously solve customer queries.
Additionally, the AI agent can help customers to complete purchases.
Announcing the pilot program in a LinkedIn post, Clara Shih, VP of Business AI at Meta, said:
You can easily set up business AIs to respond instantly to customers, free your team from repetitive tasks, and help convert more leads, faster.
“Just as we did for ads, we want to simplify and democratize powerful AI tools for even the smallest of businesses,” summarized Shih.
This latest “powerful AI tool” comes with several other notable features.
For starters, it’s multimodal, responding to both voice and written customer prompts.
Next, it’s modular, so SMBs can choose which common customer queries they’d like the bot to respond to and which they wish to leave for a human.
In delegating contacts, businesses can cautiously ramp up their automation efforts, tackling one contact reason at a time.
As they do so, SMBs may test how the bot responds to particular queries and tweak to ensure an appropriate, on-brand tone of voice.
Additionally, they may bolster the AI agent with promo codes, links, return policies, and – particularly interestingly – topics to avoid.
The latter is crucial to establish guardrails. After all, as AI thinks for itself, businesses must put a cage around it to ensure it’s not lured into saying the wrong things – as others have…
Summing up, Shih noted:
Whether you’re a one-woman shop in Brooklyn, family business in Denver, entrepreneur in Manila, or one of the other 200M businesses connecting with customers on Meta today, here’s to your success!
As Shih suggests, the scope for this technology is significant, with 600MN conversations happening between people and businesses every day on Meta’s social platforms.
However, in delivering such capabilities to small businesses for free – while in a pilot at least – Meta showcases how quickly customer service AI is becoming commoditized.
For many conversational AI vendors that may come as a concern. After all, AI reasoning and communications are no longer differentiative; how it’s integrated into operations to enhance performance is.
Speaking to this trend last month, Sridhar Vembu, Co-founder & Chief Scientist of Zoho, outlined that tech companies can not charge a premium for AI agents.
Meta’s move to make its AI agent available in a free pilot perhaps speaks to this.
Yet, it also leaves the company with a tricky pricing question once that pilot ends.
