Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, has revised how businesses are charged for using the WhatsApp Business Platform, making pricing more straightforward, cheaper in some areas, and more in line with industry-standard practices seen on other messaging channels.

These changes are expected to make it cheaper and easier for businesses to use WhatsApp instead of SMS, potentially driving higher business adoption and creating new opportunities for conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance customer interactions, industry analysts say.

Starting July 01, 2025, WhatsApp Business introduced a revamped pricing model, moving away from its old per-conversation pricing model. Previously, businesses paid a flat fee to send unlimited messages during a 24-hour conversation window.

Under the new model, businesses are now charged on a per-message basis, with revised rates and volume-based discounts based on the type of message.

At the same time, utility messages sent in response to a customer within the 24-hour service window are free, giving businesses more flexibility in how they interact with customers.

This update is set to encourage more two-way conversations instead of just one-way alerts, says Juniper Research, a research firm specializing in high growth market sectors within the digital ecosystem. This will expand use case across customer service, post-purchase engagement, and commerce.

As message volumes grow, businesses will likely rely more heavily on AI agents to automate customer interactions across WhatsApp, manage sales flows, and streamline support, making conversational AI a core component of the WhatsApp Business experience.

Conversational AI poised for surge

Conversational AI is a technology that enables machines to engage in natural, human-like conversations with users through text or speech interfaces. It relies on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep learning to understand user inputs, generate appropriate responses, and mimic human conversation patterns. Common applications include voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, enterprise virtual agents, and customer service chatbots.

The sector has expanded rapidly over the past years, especially after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Market research reflects this momentum, with Fortune Business Insights estimating that the global conversational AI market was worth a remarkable US$12.24 billion last year. This sum is set to increase by 19.3% in 2025 and reach US$14.6 billion, Juniper Research says.

In retail, the surge of conversational AI is driven by multiple factors, including consumer preference for richer, interactive messaging experiences, and the rise of conversational commerce.

Conversational commerce refers to commerce conducted through conversational interfaces, like messaging apps, leveraging AI-powered chatbots, live messaging, or voice assistants, to facilitate product discovery, support, and transactions directly within conversations

In China, WeChat exemplifies of the model. WeChat is a messaging app that integrates several key features and capabilities including social media, payments, and e-commerce. It has become a key messaging channel for conversational commerce, allowing users to interact with brands via chats, either with live agents or AI bots, browse products, ask questions, and even complete purchases directly in the conversation using WeChat Pay.

Juniper Research predicts that global spending over conversational commerce will grow substantially by nearly 90% between 2025 and 2029.

In financial services, conversational AI adoption is being fueled by both internal and customer-facing applications. JP Morgan Chase, for example, launched in July 2024 LLM Suite, an internal AI assistant that assists more than 200,000 employees with idea generation and content drafting.

Meanwhile, Bank of America has been running its proprietary conversational AI solution called Erica since 2018, assisting customers with banking tasks, providing financial advice, helping with transactions, and identifying savings opportunities. By April 2024, Erica had surpassed more than 2 billion interactions and helped over 42 million customers.

Cheaper authentication

Another key change in WhatsApp’s updated pricing model is the sharp reduction in the cost of authentication traffic, such as one-time passwords (OTPs). WhatsApp has introduced market-specific, category-based volume tiers for both utility and authentication messages, allowing businesses to benefit from lower pricing as their usage grows.

In key markets like Brazil, India, and Indonesia, Juniper Research claims that the cost of sending authentication messages via WhatsApp is now just 15% to 30% of the cost of an equivalent SMS.

This price advantage is expected to make WhatsApp the preferred channel for companies that rely on secure logins and identity verification, the research firm says. More businesses are set to route OTPs through WhatsApp first, making the messaging app a strong alternative to SMS, especially for large enterprises that must handle large volumes of messages.

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