More than 25 startups collapsed or pivoted in Nigeria when WhatsApp banking faded in Nigeria. Yes, that your big bank’s WhatsApp banking solution suddenly disappeared in the channel. That is one of the perils of building on some of these platforms. Simply, one change in the Terms & Conditions can break business models.
Meta which owns WhatsApp has one this week and it has to do with using WhatsApp to distribute AI agents: “Starting next year, Meta will ban some chatbots from WhatsApp… Meta said businesses using AI to serve customers on the platform won’t be affected. So, for example, a travel company won’t be barred from running a bot for customer service on the app. Rather, the move aims to prevent companies, besides Meta, from using WhatsApp to distribute AI agents. ” -LinkedIn News.
In other words, Meta wants to keep WhatsApp for the distribution of only Meta’s AI agents! So, OpenAI, Perplexity, etc must find new ecosystems to distribute their agents. And that brings to my question: “What Is Your Platform Risk?”
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