WATI Co-Founder Bianca Ho Shares Insights on how AI is Transforming Business Messaging

In our rapidly evolving digital landscape, AI is revolutionising business communication, streamlining customer interactions, and enhancing engagement at scale. In this interview, Bianca Ho, the co-founder and CEO of WATI, discusses AI’s impact on customer engagement and the job market while offering practical advice for businesses and professionals navigating the AI era.

Question: What motivated your shift from a banking career at JP Morgan to co-founding an AI-driven company like WATI?

Bianca: Thank you so much for having me. I’m Bianca, the co-founder and CEO of Wati. It all started when I was studying economics at university. Banking seemed like a very natural and high-paying job option after graduation, you know. And, of course, I was very blessed to be at JP Morgan. But deep down, I knew that banking was not something I liked to do day in and day out. Whenever I read, all the research was mainly about technology. So that was something that I was very aware and self-aware of. Eventually, I decided to take an 80% pay cut to join a local Hong Kong startup, as I’m based in Hong Kong. That’s kind of the background before starting the AI company Wati, which is in a very similar space in customer engagement.

Question: Can you discuss the role of AI in WATI’s platform and how it enhances personalised customer interactions at scale?

Bianca: Sure. Let me take a step back and explain what Wati is, what we do, who we work with, and how AI helps them. Today, Wati works with 12,000 customers across the globe in 165 countries. It’s a very global platform. What we do is we simplify business messaging. Specifically, we help our customers on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger for their sales, marketing and support conversations. Being in a conversational heavy kind of market, we understood AI was very important early on because there’s just a much bigger volume compared to other forms. After all, it’s so much easier to produce text.

So what we have done so far is we’ve launched an AI agent called Nobot, of which, just by using extremely simple PDF websites, you can then help your agent to automatically respond to your end customers. And at the same time, when it detects an intention of talking to an agent, then it will be passed on to someone in Wati so meeting your team can use say like you know, first qualified the lead using the PDF, and then later on, then pass on to say, Emmanuel, when the customer asks for additional information that the AI agent can’t respond. And that really improves our customers efficiency.

Question: In your view, what does the future hold for AI in transforming business messaging and customer engagement?

Bianca: I think it’s an incredibly exciting time for us to be alike. And particularly, I would say AI can do a lot on the business messaging side because of the, you know, the use case I was just explaining on lead qualification, on making an appointment to introducing the products. Like, those are things and simple things that the agent can already do. And I think what’s additional is that you can also book the appointment, right, not just like, hey, you know, what does your service do? How can I join and all that… and then redirect them to another thing. What is very exciting is the action piece right, which is like, ‘hey, do you process a payment or process a refund? What are the frameworks that you set around that? What’s the workflow? How does the current team check?’ So, I think there are a lot of things that we can do to automate those conversations and, at the same time, drive business results.

Question: As AI takes over more customer-facing roles, how should companies balance efficiency with ethical concerns like bias, privacy, and transparency?

Bianca: I think each company needs to think in terms of the data access and then you know, how do you set the relevant frameworks, workflows, and ways to prevent it from being misused. I think the ethical concerns are very easy to solve for. To solve privacy issues, for example, we need to validate whether that person is the right person. You need them to log in. For transparency, make it clear to customers that they’re talking to an AI agent. In fact, I’ve actually seen a switch in human behaviors, with trust towards AI agents becoming higher. So I would say there’s a behavioral shift for using AI to handle customer-facing conversations. But at the same time, I think it’s through the iteration of trial and error that you can find the fine line that works for your company, or which are the very mission-critical things that you don’t want an AI to touch.

Question: Amid growing AI automation across industries, how do you see AI reshaping the job market, and what skills should professionals focus on developing?

Bianca:  So today, I would say it’s like computers. You can either use it very well, or you can use, say, the abacus to calculate, right? I think everyone must devote time to learning about AI and using different AI agents to assist your work. And, of course, I think AI would take on some roles a lot more, some roles a bit less. In terms of kind of, like reshaping the job market, I think some professions are most impacted, say support or customer engagement.

Bottomline, I think we have to learn how to work alongside AI. If you’re a coder, you need to learn co-pilots. If you are a journalist, you need to kind of figure out how to use Chatgpt to come up with interview questions. Meanwhile, you already know how to guide that conversation. Basically, I think it’s going to be omnipresent, and you need to learn how to work alongside an AI in order to be more effective.

Question: Typically, discussions around AI often focus on big corporations, but how can AI-driven solutions help SMEs compete in the digital economy?

Bianca: The more I read about the progress that we see day to day in AI, the more I think big corporations no longer have that edge because you can build a lot faster and iterate faster with a smaller team. And I think the AI-driven solutions now are, like, say, even on the LLM level, cheaper, kind of, like change very, very quickly, right? They’re always another LLM that’s competing with, say, ChatGPT. In that case, I think it’s helping SMEs by increasing the pie; basically, more and more customers, or SMEs, large companies can pay to access to these tools and be able to do it much more effectively. So now I’ve seen a lot more when I talk to my friends and I ask, like, hey, how do you do this? Like they’re somehow involving Chatgpt And you can use different models too. And I think that is very good for the SMEs because the pace will be a lot faster. You need to be more agile.

Question: AI has many benefits, as you and I know. But there are also many concerns stemming from privacy issues, deepfakes and the rest of them. All of these concerns have led to calls for AI regulation. Amid these calls for regulations, what balance do you think should be struck between fostering innovation and ensuring responsible AI development?

Bianca:  It’s very interesting. I was reading one book about management, and one of the quotes would resonate a lot. The quote was like, you cannot create systems that only focus on the very few that are abusing the system. The book is not specifically on tech or anything. It’s actually about a very famous hot pot chain restaurant in China called Heidi Lao. And what I found incredibly interesting about that quote is the balance of innovation and responsible AI development.

However, I think the regulation should still be there but not stifling innovation. When you stifle innovation, you’re left behind. So, I think it’s critical to stay on top of innovation, rather than being left behind. Policies and regulations are good. But I would err on the side of more innovation that create opportunities rather than policies that too restrictive.

Question: Women remain underrepresented in AI and tech leadership. Based on your experience, what steps can the industry take to close this gap?

Bianca: I’m incredibly lucky. Within WATI, roughly 50% of our team are women leaders. As an industry participant, what I’m trying to do is in two folds. One is just to hire the best people for your roles. But of course, I think it’s incredibly important not to let the fact that you know this candidate is female or that they might bear a child to cloud your judgment on their performance. Our company also has very generous paid maternity and paternity leave, because we want to ensure our team can balance a very challenging work environment together with fulfillment on the personal side.

The second piece of it is continually mentoring and inspiring other women to take on these roles. I don’t think it’s a matter of education. I think it’s more a matter of I’ve seen like every time, you know, when I talk to people, they’ll be like, oh, you know, I’ve seen Elon Musk where I heard about this quote, and that’s why I also want to be like him. Those are usually the inspirations that people need in their daily lives, and the fact that, yeah, my team and I will continually be part of that kind of inspiration.

Question: There’s an ongoing debate about AI’s role in the creative industries. Do you think AI can ever truly replicate human creativity, or should it be seen purely as an assistive tool?

Bianca: I think it will be more of an assistive tool. Again, it’s like a computer. I can’t do any work without a computer. But also, the computer is not the only way to work. I can also think. I can also read. There are many ways to do work.

My view is this: for creative industries, it’s more of an assistant, right? Like, you can just speed up the content creation, or speed up the video taking, or, like, you know, cutting out, like sound bites, like making shorts, like they can make this faster. At the core of the human has to be, you know, hey, where do I want to bring this? Why do I think this is important? Why do I think, fundamentally, this is important? And then, what type of content do I create? Who do I want to speak to? What niche do I target? It’s more about driving that direction right, rather than like, hey, just generate like, 10 random questions or topics that I’ll just talk about.

Question: Just a follow-up to that question; we see chatbots and AI-driven communication tools like Wati continue to improve. So as this continues to happen, do you think they will ever fully replace so many interactions in customer service?

Bianca: Even as someone in this industry, I think completely replacing is challenging because there are so many edge cases. There are like human things where, like, hey, it’s an old time client, you know. Like, there are things that are human nature. It would be difficult to add all of the edge cases to this tool. That said,I don’t think AI will fully replace human interactions.

Question: How do you see AI impacting emerging markets, especially in regions where digital infrastructure is still developing?

Bianca: I think it is gonna leapfrog, if you ask me. In countries like the US and Canada, email remains the dominant tool for customer support because it’s widely used. However, in regions like Asia and Africa, messaging apps play a much bigger role since email adoption is lower. People there rely more on chat-based communication, which explains the high penetration of apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. Because of this, emerging markets are likely to skip the traditional progression of email, phone, and then messaging. Instead, they’ll adopt messaging platforms directly for customer interactions. In our space, this shift is already happening.

Question: Let’s talk about misinformation in the age of AI. With the rise of deepfake technology, what strategies should businesses and policymakers adopt to combat AI-driven misinformation?

Bianca: I always look at quotes or ask for quotes after reading what’s in ChatGPT or Deepseek. I think it’s important to stay critical or have critical thinking when it comes to consuming content. Yeah, I think that is more important.

Question: So the responsibility lies partly with the users. That’s what you mean by that, right?

Bianca: Yes, yeah. Like, the user needs to not take everything that is generated from those directly. You meed to ask, does it make sense? Does it come from a trustworthy source? All of that must be taken into account.

Question: Drawing from your journey, what advice would you offer to individuals who are looking to transition into tech, especially in the AI domain?

Bianca: My advice would be to start it first. Launch it and get feedback. Some people try to perfect it as much as possible. But the faster you get user feedback, the faster you know whether something is going to work or not.

Question: Looking ahead, what excites you the most about AI’s potential, and what do you think will be the biggest challenge and biggest advantages to come out of AI in the next 10 years?

Bianca: In the next 10 years, I think AI would continue to be developed. It would become like, say, one AI is really good at doing analytics, that other AI is really good at, like mathematics, like another AI is very good at like, analysis. I think that’s where I expect it to be, continually developing.The challenge then would be, what are we (humans) left to do? Like, what do fresh graduates do? That’s like, a huge question mark to me. I think that’s one of the challenges that humans will need to face in the next 10 years.

Question: Some people think AI is the highest level of innovation we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity. Do you think another innovation would ever supersede what we currently see right now with regards to AI?

Bianca: Perhaps our ability to live on another planet. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the world is very exciting right now. It’s very fast-paced. And I think it creates a. Lot of anxiety in people, too. Like, for me, I’m constantly asking, what am I doing now? What’s next to do? The next big thing would definitely be to conquer another planet. For as long as humanity has been around, we’ve always been on this earth. So, figuring a way to find another habitable place on another planet would definitely be another major Leapfrog. I do hope we can stick with our homes, though.

Question: Do you plan to expand to Africa anytime soon?

Bianca: I’m interested in learning more about the market. I don’t know it very well right now. We do have customers in Nigeria, but not a whole lot yet. So yeah, that’s a market I’m definitely interested in.

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