People message a business on WhatsApp the way they used to phone it, and they expect the same thing a phone call gave them: an answer now. WelcomeAI is coming to WhatsApp, and when it arrives your assistant will answer your business number from the same content your website answers from.
The part we are most proud of is what your customer will not see. There is no bot account, no third-party sender and no mention of us. The reply comes from your number, under your name.
WhatsApp is the next channel we are finishing. We will share the date here as soon as it is fixed, and the details below may still get sharper before then.
Two views of the same conversation
Switch between what your customer sees on their phone and what lands in your inbox.
Your name on every reply
Every message will leave from your own number, under the verified name Meta approved for your WhatsApp Business Account. Nothing in WelcomeAI sets that name and nothing you configure changes it. To your customer, the assistant's reply looks exactly like one a person on your team typed.
What WelcomeAI decides is what the assistant knows and how it writes. If you want it to introduce itself by a name of its own, "Mia from Northwind" for example, you write that into its instructions. It becomes something the assistant says, never the name on the account.
The phone number arrives with the first message
Every other channel makes you work for a contact detail. WhatsApp hands it over with the first word, because Meta identifies people by the number they write from.
That changes how the assistant behaves. It is told it already has the number, so it never asks somebody writing from their phone to type their phone number, and it spends its questions on what you do not know yet. The number is written onto the lead the first time anything else is saved, so a conversation that ends after a single answer still leaves somebody you can call back.1
A channel with its own rules
WhatsApp and Instagram look alike from a distance. Up close they behave differently, and the assistant follows each one's rules.
The third row is the one to plan around. On WhatsApp the 24-hour window from each customer message is hard: once it closes, the only way to reach somebody is a message template Meta approved in advance. So every thread in the inbox will carry a countdown, and a Slack channel can hear about a waiting customer while there is still time to answer.
What it will not do at first
We would rather you hear the limits from us than find them.
- Messaging people first. Reaching somebody outside the 24 hours needs an approved template, which Meta charges for per message. The first version answers people who wrote to you.
- Buttons and lists. WhatsApp can render them; the assistant sends text.
- Photos, audio and documents. They are recorded in the conversation and not answered. A message with no words is left alone rather than met with an apology.
- More than one number. One number per workspace.
Questions people ask
Nothing needs doing yet. The most useful thing you can do before WhatsApp arrives is the same thing that improves your website today: make sure the knowledge base answers the questions your customers actually send.
welcomeai.devWhatsApp integration: an AI chatbot for your business number
