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.
