When Jayant Tyagi, a Salesforce software engineer, wants quick answers from ChatGPT, he doesn't bother opening the app or heading to his browser.
Instead, he fires off a voice message to ChatGPT inside WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging service owned by Meta.
"I'm already an avid WhatsApp user, so it makes sense to access ChatGPT right there instead of installing yet another app," he told Business Insider. "It's super quick."
Tyagi is far from alone. Lately, WhatsApp has quietly become the place where users around the world talk to and juggle multiple rival AI chatbots like those from OpenAI and Perplexity alongside Meta AI, Meta's own assistant that the company bakes into the app.
WhatsApp, used by more than 3 billion people globally, is "the largest surface that people use Meta AI on," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's April earnings call. The app is also becoming an AI free-for-all, with rival chatbots now jockeying for attention inside.
As WhatsApp becomes one of the most important battlegrounds in consumer AI, that competition could make it harder for Meta AI to become the default choice for the billions of users the company hopes to win over.
"A lot of people are finding WhatsApp to be a natural and useful place to explore AI," Meta spokesperson Vispi Bhopti told BI.
Bhopti added that more than a billion users use Meta AI across WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, although WhatsApp continues to see the strongest usage.
"We believe people will try multiple AIs and choose what's right for them," Bhopti said.
OpenAI, which made ChatGPT available on WhatsApp at the end of last year, said that the move is part of a broader accessibility mission.
"We're continuing to reduce barriers for people new to AI to experience the power of this technology," an OpenAI spokesperson told BI.
Perplexity's chatbot, which launched on WhatsApp in the spring, now handles more than a million queries a day on the app, a spokesperson told BI. Demand for the bot on WhatsApp was so strong that it briefly crashed at launch.
"Perplexity's WhatsApp bot has seen unprecedented demand — volume far beyond anything we anticipated," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted a month ago.
OpenAI and Perplexity plug into WhatsApp
Rival chatbots plug in to WhatsApp through WhatsApp Business Platform, a service that lets larger businesses pay Meta to send messages to people asking to receive them, and which nets the company over $1 billion a year, Bhopti said.
This means any company can run a chatbot on WhatsApp simply by paying Meta, no formal partnership required. In practice, that has opened the door for rival AI companies to tap into WhatsApp's massive global audience without needing Meta's explicit blessing.
That reach is especially valuable in emerging markets. While WhatsApp has roughly 100 million monthly users in the US, its footprint is far larger in countries like India and Brazil, where it serves as a primary communication tool, and for many, the main gateway to the internet.
By plugging into WhatsApp, companies like OpenAI and Perplexity can grow their presence in these markets without having to convince users to download separate apps or sign up for new services.
"We do not think of users as 'monetizable,'" a Perplexity spokesperson told BI. "We think about them as people with questions, and our mission is to answer any question, any time, on any platform. Users choose to upgrade to Perplexity Pro for many reasons, but it's their choice. This experience aligns with the spirit of WhatsApp as well."
For users, WhatsApp is becoming an AI marketplace where chatbots from different companies now compete for attention inside the same app.
Users can reach both ChatGPT and Perplexity on WhatsApp simply by saving their official numbers in your phone's contacts (1-800-CHATGPT — handy!) and starting a chat — no sign-up required. Both allow users to ask questions, generate images, and interact with voice notes.
"Using these bots directly in WhatsApp feels more natural, like texting a smart friend, compared to opening separate apps for each one," Sumit Gupta, an engineer at San Francisco-based productivity startup Notion, told BI.
Both bots are restricted to one-on-one chats. Meta AI, on the other hand, can be pulled directly into group conversations, which remains a key advantage for it.
"I use Meta AI a lot in groups to generate memes and create polls," Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukuri, an engineering manager at Microsoft, told BI. "But if I want something more creative, like Ghibli-style images, I'll go to ChatGPT. I still trust Perplexity's search the most."
WhatsApp has unexpected advantages
WhatsApp has long been a breeding ground for misinformation. Now, users are turning AI chatbots on the app into their own truth squads.
Vootukuri said that he often pulls Meta AI into group chats to "bust fake videos," especially around politics, that crop up in conversations. Srinivas, the Perplexity CEO, highlighted the trend on LinkedIn earlier this year, urging users to forward misinformation to Perplexity's WhatsApp chatbot and get it fact-checked instantly.
A Perplexity spokesperson told BI that the company introduced the feature because "WhatsApp, in particular, often struggles with misinformation through forwarded messages."
AI chatbots through WhatsApp can work even on flights. Many airlines limit in-flight WiFi to basic messaging apps, and since the ChatGPT and Perplexity bots run entirely within WhatsApp, users can easily access them midair, as several people have posted on social media.
For power users, mixing and matching chatbots within WhatsApp has become second nature.
"I use Meta AI a lot for rephrasing messages or casual stuff where I don't care about accuracy," Manas Paldhe, a software engineer at Infinitus Systems, told BI. "But when I want a more retrieval-based approach, such as getting links to news articles, I turn to Perplexity. For serious writing or deeper work, I still go back to ChatGPT."
That kind of flexibility could make it harder for Meta to lock users into its own assistant.
For now, users seem happy with the growing AI mix inside the app. After all, the best chatbot is simply the one that gets the job done, no matter where it lives.
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