Introducing WelcomeAI for Instagram: your assistant, in your DMs

Your website has been answering questions for a while. On 15 October the same assistant starts answering somewhere your customers already spend their evenings: your Instagram Direct Messages.

Connect a professional account, choose the knowledge base it answers from, and the question that used to wait in your inbox until morning gets an answer from your own content in seconds. Anyone on your team can step in the moment a conversation needs a person.

See it in a thread

One evening conversation with a made-up shop, Northwind. Watch the lead fill in as the thread goes, then flip the switch to take the conversation over.

Three things happen in that thread that are worth pointing out. The assistant says it is a bot once, before its first answer. It answers from the shipping policy you already wrote. And it asks for one detail, gets it, and stops.

An assistant written for a phone

A Direct Message is not a web page. It holds about a thousand characters, shows no formatting, and is read by somebody expecting two sentences. So Instagram gets its own assistant, answering from the same knowledge base as your website but configured on its own.

• Its own instructions. Write them for the channel: short answers, one question at a time, and whatever your shop must never say. Tuning them does not change your website.
• Its own model. A DM is short, so a fast model usually reads better here than the one your site uses.
• Plain text by default. Instagram renders no formatting, so bold would arrive with its asterisks showing. A long answer is split across messages, or you can switch that off and keep every reply short.
• One disclosure, once. Meta requires telling people they are talking to a bot. Your line is sent before the first answer of each conversation, not stamped on every message.

Every conversation can end with a contact

Instagram tells you who wrote. Only the conversation can tell you how to reach them.

Meta shares a username, a display name and a profile picture, and never an email or a phone number, through any permission. So the assistant asks inside the thread, one question at a time, and saves each answer the moment it arrives.

With the built-in questions only the email is required, so one answer completes the lead and the assistant stops asking. If you want more, pick one of your own lead forms and it works through the fields you marked required. And when the address already belongs to somebody in your Leads, the conversation joins that contact instead of creating a second one.

Your team can take any thread back

The assistant handles the evening. Your team decides which conversations it keeps.

The Slack message carries what Instagram itself never shows: the person's name, their email, what they last said, and when the reply window closes.

What you need on 15 October

• A professional Instagram account, Business or Creator
• A knowledge base with your content in it
• The Pro plan or above

That is the whole list. There is no Facebook Page to find and no Page administrator to chase: we use Business Login for Instagram, so you sign in with the Instagram account itself. Getting the knowledge base right is the part worth doing now, before the date arrives.

What it does not do yet

Photos, voice notes and story replies arrive and are recorded in the conversation, and the assistant does not answer them yet. A message with no words is left alone rather than answered with an apology for not being able to see it.

It answers Direct Messages, not comments or mentions. Those use a separate permission on the same Meta app, and they are the natural next step.

Questions people ask

The assistant that already answers on your site is about to answer where your customers message you. Get the knowledge base ready now, and on 15 October connecting Instagram is one sign-in away.