How will AI significantly enhance WhatsApp and RCS services to grow the volume in the next 1-2 years?

Time of India

2 days ago

Ping! A WhatsApp notification lights up your phone. If it's a text, you might glance and move on, but an interactive carousel or video attachment? That's enough to draw you in, whether from a friend or a brand. With a whopping 84% of consumers now preferring rich, engaging formats over plain text, it has forced a shift in expectations and is driving an explosive growth in channels like WhatsApp and Rich Communication Services (RCS). In 2024, RCS adoption in omnichannel strategies skyrocketed by 500% globally, fueled by the iOS 18 release, while WhatsApp solidified its dominance with a 30% year-on-year increase in brands using it for conversational marketing. As businesses race to deliver seamless, human-like interactions, AI has come to the forefront to supercharge these channels with hyper-personalized, predictive conversations. India is a key player in this global trend and stands out as a leader in driving messaging innovation.
India: A testbed for innovation
With over
500 million users
, India has emerged as a strategic market for WhatsApp, providing the scale and diversity needed to test and refine features like Payments in messaging, user-friendly
WhatsApp Flows
, and the simplified Business Calling API. These features are already making a real difference for local businesses across industries, enabling more seamless and interactive customer engagement through the channel the customer is familiar with. This widespread adoption is no coincidence as India's mobile-first, multilingual population creates an ideal environment for experimenting with AI-driven messaging solutions. As these use cases mature locally, they're not only enhancing customer experience but also setting a scalable model for regional and global markets. This ongoing innovation in the conversational commerce and messaging ecosystem is also charting a new growth trajectory for the telecom industry.
The telecom opportunity: Redefining customer experience
For mobile network operators or telcos, the pressure to evolve and modernize customer experience (CX) is no longer just a competitive advantage. It is essential for survival. As customers grow accustomed to seamless, app-like interactions from digital-native brands, traditional call centers and one-way SMS notifications are starting to feel outdated and annoying. To stay relevant, telcos must adopt and provide a richer, more interactive channels like WhatsApp and RCS, which enable branded conversations through carousels, quick replies, and verified sender IDs.
Not just better customer engagement, these new features and channels open up powerful monetization opportunities for the entire ecosystem. Premium messaging services, like transactional alerts, onboarding journeys, and loyalty campaigns - all position telcos as strategic partners for brands. In markets like India, where WhatsApp Payments is experiencing growth, telecom operators can further drive value by enabling recharges, bill payments, and added services directly within the chat. Combined with AI, these features evolve into intelligent channels for communication that scale, personalize, and streamline customer conversations, boosting satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue for both brands and the telcos.
How AI will supercharge whatsApp and RCS for telcos?
For telcos, integrating AI into customer interactions powered by technology is changing the way brands connect with audiences and bring multi-fold benefits to both customers and brands.
Hyper-personalized customer interactions
Businesses are now using AI-powered
NLP
and machine learning to analyze user data and deliver personalized messages, offers, and recommendations. Brands are also using AI-powered WhatsApp and RCS carousel messages to boost customer engagement by promoting products and services specifically tailored to user interests. Predictive analytics even picks up the interaction from where the user left off and enables features like timely cart abandonment reminders and personalized offers, creating more human-like, engaging experiences. Building on this, advanced chatbots handle complex multilingual conversations, guiding users through support, purchases, or bookings. With 24/7 availability and sentiment analysis, they are able to manage extremely high volumes efficiently and quickly route sensitive issues to human agents when needed. This smart blend of automation and empathy builds trust and makes messaging the preferred channel for fast, reliable service.
Automated campaign optimization
Real-time communication optimization is a benefit that stands out with AI automatically adjusting message timing, format, and content based on user engagement, be it text, video, or interactive elements. RCS channels now enhance this with rich media features like carousels and suggested replies, driving higher click-through rates and request resolutions. AI-powered A/B testing further sharpens performance by quickly identifying the best-performing variations, enabling faster, smarter, and more efficient execution that meets modern customer expectations.
Seamless cross-channel integration
AI-powered tools now create and enable unified customer journeys by integrating channels like WhatsApp, RCS, email, social media with CRM and other enterprise systems. This way, conversational journeys flow naturally - what starts on RCS can easily continue on WhatsApp and be followed up via email, without losing context. It's a small shift with a big impact. These connected experiences are easy to follow for the customer and drive higher engagement and repeat interactions, ultimately increasing overall messaging volume.
Enhanced security and trust
Trust and security are key factors in customer experience, especially today. AI-driven systems are now able to identify and block spam or phishing attempts in real time, protecting both the brand and the customer. For example, verified RCS messages with recognizable logos and secure, trackable links further boost user confidence to use the service. The result is simple but powerful, i.e., when people trust the message, they're far more likely to interact with it.
Conclusion: The AI-driven future of messaging
AI has established itself as the next catalyst in transforming WhatsApp and RCS into powerful channels that go beyond just increasing message volume and user interactions. By enabling richer, hyper-personalized interactions, AI not only drives higher channel usage but also significantly improves the efficacy and ROI of these messaging channels for brands as well as telcos. It will further advance businesses' omnichannel strategies by delivering smarter, more integrated customer experiences. WhatsApp, with
3 billion
global users, is already a key channel for brand-consumer engagement, and AI-driven personalization and automation will only accelerate this growth. At the same time, RCS is rapidly scaling, with research indicating an increase to
6 trillion
messages in 2029, fueled further by Apple's support and AI's ability to deliver rich, interactive content. For industries like telcos, these channels offer a chance to redefine customer experience, strengthen omnichannel strategies, and unlock new revenue streams, particularly in markets like India.