How AI helps with WhatsApp business messaging, and where it should not

Where AI helps

1. 1 The questions you answer every day Opening hours, prices, where an order has got to, whether something comes in another size. A short list, asked all day by different people. An AI answers it in seconds, without interrupting your team.
2. 2 Messages that arrive after hours An enquiry at eleven at night usually waits until morning. By then, the customer has asked someone else. The AI answers that night.
3. 3 Leads from your ads Someone taps a click-to-WhatsApp ad and asks "how much?". The AI answers, then asks what your salespeople would ask — budget, location, dates — so the person who calls back knows who they are calling.
4. 4 Collecting details before a hand-over An order number, a booking reference, a photo of the problem. By the time a person opens the chat, the facts are already there.

Where a person should answer

Some messages need a person who can make a decision, apologise or make an exception. An AI can only pretend to do those things. Leave these to your team:

• Complaints, refunds and anything that starts with "this is unacceptable".
• Discounts and exceptions — a price your price list does not show.
• Medical, legal or financial advice. A clinic's AI can book an appointment; it should not suggest a dose.
• Anyone who asks for a person. Give them one.

What good AI on WhatsApp does

Fast replies are common. What matters is how an AI handles the conversations that are not simple. We built Endelir's AI teammate to do the following — ask any other provider whether theirs does the same:

• It answers from your material — your documents, price list, website and policies — not from whatever it read on the internet.
• It does not invent prices. A price or promise it cannot find in what you gave it is replaced before the reply goes out.
• It groups related messages into one reply. When a customer types "Hi", "my bike", "not starting" as three messages, it waits a few seconds and answers them together. That is one reply, not three — and on WhatsApp each reply is billed.
• It steps aside. The moment someone on your team replies, it stops on that conversation until the chat is resolved or someone switches it back on.
• If it has nothing useful to say, it sends the line you chose for that situation, or nothing. The customer never receives an error message.
• Your fixed answers come first. Keyword replies and chat flows you set up run before the AI, which takes what is left.

More on how this works day to day: AI customer support on WhatsApp and lead qualification.

What AI on WhatsApp costs

There are two costs. The first is Meta's: an AI reply is a service message, free for the first 1,000 a month on each number and ₹0.115 after that in India — the same as a reply typed by a person.

The second is the AI itself. On Endelir it comes with the plan, counted in AI calls — each time the AI is asked to work on a reply. Growth includes 2,000 in any 30 days and Scale 15,000. When a plan's calls run out, the AI carries on with your own account at an AI company such as OpenAI or Google, if you have added its key, billed by that company. The Starter plan has no AI.

Meta also sells its own AI, Meta Business Agent, at $2.00 per million tokens — the small chunks of text AI is billed by. Meta estimates a typical message at 20,000 to 25,000 tokens, about 4 to 5 US cents, and unlike every other message it is charged even inside the free window after a click-to-WhatsApp ad. What a WhatsApp API message costs has the full price list.

From answering to selling

On the Scale plan, in early access, Endelir's AI can also sell: it recommends from your own products and prices, and it never invents urgency — it mentions a deadline or limited stock only when you have set one.

See what each plan includes.

How to start

1. 1 List your twenty questions Scroll back through a week of chats and write down what people ask most. Those are the questions the AI has to answer well.
2. 2 Give it the answers Your price list, policies, timings and the documents your staff already use. It answers from these, so a gap here becomes a gap in its answers.
3. 3 Decide where it hands over Complaints, discounts, anything you listed above. Make sure someone owns the chats it passes on.
4. 4 Read the first fifty conversations Where an answer is wrong, correct the material behind it. The cause is often a missing line, and once it is there the AI has the right answer to give.

Questions

About the author

Hardik Datanwala is the founder of Endelir, a shared WhatsApp inbox with an AI teammate for businesses in India, built by Mosorb India LLP in Goa. Endelir is a verified Meta Tech Provider: it connects businesses to the WhatsApp Business API through Meta's own signup.

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