How to Add an AI Assistant to WhatsApp Business

Everything happens inside a Meta business portfolio (Business Manager), and it needs to be verified with your company details before Meta will let you go further. Ours was already verified, which saved days.

Verify your website address in the same place. Meta offers a DNS record or a meta tag in the head of your pages; we used the meta tag. Then make sure your privacy page explains the automatic answers: what is stored, for how long, who writes the replies and that every reply is marked. Meta reads it during the review.

In Meta for Developers, create an app with the WhatsApp use case and attach it to your business portfolio. Meta gives you a free test number straight away, so you can build everything before touching your real one.

Create a system user in your business settings, give it the app and the WhatsApp account, and generate a permanent key for it. That key and the app's secret go into your website's private settings, never into the code. Then point the app's webhook at an address on your website, check every delivery against the app secret, and subscribe to two fields: messages, for what people send you, and smb_message_echoes, for what you send from the Business app, which is how the assistant knows you have replied.

This is where it becomes yours. Ours are simple. Wait ten minutes after the last message before answering, so you always get the first chance. If you have chatted with that person in the last 24 hours, stay out of it completely. Answer only from your own pages, never guess a price, never promise results, never mention other companies, and reply in the language the person wrote in.

End every reply with a one-line automatic reply label; in the EU that has been required in the chat itself since 2 August 2026. Add a daily limit (ours is 100 replies) and delete the message text once it has been answered.

Add your own phone as a test recipient in the app and send yourself the ready-made template from the dashboard first, because a test number cannot receive a first message from anyone until the business has written to them. Then reply from your phone with a real question and watch the answer arrive.

While testing, shorten the wait to one minute. Our first test reply came back 90 seconds after the question, and we used what we saw to make the replies shorter.

To use the assistant on the number customers already know, while you keep the WhatsApp Business app on your phone, you need Meta's coexistence onboarding, and that is only open to approved partners. You either pay a partner company or, like us, become a Tech Provider yourself, which is free but means an app review.

The review asks for an app icon and category, your website, a description of how you use each permission, answers about how you handle data, a successful test call for each permission (these can take up to 24 hours to register) and two short screen recordings: one of a message arriving and being answered, and one of your app managing your WhatsApp account, for example creating a message template. Meta says most reviews take up to 20 days. Once approved, Meta gives you a ready-made signup link, you scan a code in the Business app, and your number is connected.