How WhatsApp is using AI-powered Interakt to drive conversational commerce in India

Interakt, a WhatsApp Business solution built on the official WhatsApp Business API (Application Programming Interface), is today a leader in conversational commerce, which basically refers to the intersection of messaging apps and shopping. 

As a leader in conversational commerce, Interakt has helped countless small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to promote their offerings, boost sales, and support customers at scale, which was previously only a distant dream with conventional channels like emails, SMS, and telecommunication, said Aakrit Vaish, Co-founder and CEO of Interakt and Jio Haptik.

Reliance Jio had acquired a majority stake in Haptik in 2019 for $100 mn. The telecom behemoth holds 87 per cent in the company while the founding team holds the remaining stake.

“Interakt and Haptik are leveraging WhatsApp as a customer management solution which is driven by AI-based operations. For every business starting with India, can we provide an end to end solution to be able to acquire new customers on WhatsApp, drive transaction and use WhatsApp commerce to directly transact within WhatsApp, and finally deliver customer support. We want to provide a solution for all businesses in India that can provide all these solutions,” Vaish said at the WhatsApp on Wheels event in Mumbai on Thursday.

He added that in 2020 Interakt was built as a new product and got to 1,000 customers within a year. “They were all paying merchants. Then we wanted to double down on that path. In 2022, Interakt- was the no 1 app on Shopify,” he said.

Today, he adds, we have more than 10,000 customers across 15 countries. “This decade your first interaction point to your customers will be messaging and in this country WhatsApp. It used to be a browser and a mobile app in the last decade and the decade before that respectively,” he adds.

By next year, Interakt aims to grow to 50,000 businesses across the world. “By 2027, we want to reach a million merchants to facilitate their engagement with their customers,” he said.