How to put an AI agent on your WhatsApp Business number

In India and the Gulf, WhatsApp is where enquiries arrive, orders get chased and complaints land. Most teams answer it by hand from one phone, so replies wait for whoever is free. An AI agent on the same number answers in seconds, does the repeated work, and passes the rest to a person with the whole conversation attached.

What it can do well

• Answer product, price, stock and availability questions from your live data, not a copy that goes stale.
• Qualify a new enquiry with your questions, then book a call or create the lead in your CRM.
• Tell a customer where their order or booking is, after confirming it is really them.
• Send reminders and follow-ups inside the hours and rules you set.
• Reply in the language the customer writes in, including mixed Hindi and English.

What it needs from you

• A WhatsApp Business number on the official platform, not a personal phone or an unofficial tool. Unofficial routes get numbers restricted.
• Your FAQs, prices and policies written down. The agent cannot know what nobody wrote.
• Access to the systems with the answers: catalogue, orders, bookings, calendar, CRM.
• A rule for when a person takes over, and a person who actually does.

Meta's rules shape the design

Inside 24 hours of a customer's last message you can reply freely. Outside that window, a business can only message a customer with a pre-approved template, and Meta charges for those template messages. So reminders and follow-ups are designed as templates up front, and the agent is built to keep the customer talking inside the window rather than chasing them outside it. Customers must also be able to opt out, and the agent has to respect it.

The hand-over decides whether it loses sales

The agent should say it is an AI, answer what it can, and pass the conversation to a person the moment it is unsure, the customer is upset, or money is involved. The person sees the full thread and picks up without asking the customer to repeat themselves. Loopwave, a shared WhatsApp inbox we built, works this way: one number, many people, CRM and tickets, with AI auto-reply for the questions it can handle.

Test your current setup tonight: message your own business number at 11pm with a stock question. However long the reply takes is what your customers are waiting.

Platform or custom build?

If your questions are simple and your data lives in one tool, a WhatsApp platform with a built-in AI assistant may be enough, and it is cheaper. A custom agent earns its cost when it has to read and act in your own systems: live stock, order changes, bookings, your CRM. We will tell you which one you need on the first call.