India high priority for Meta globally for the scale it offers: Sandhya Devanathan

At their first WhatsApp Business Summit in India, Meta announced several features and updates that will help businesses across the country build a presence, create great in-chat experiences for customers and drive performance ahead of the upcoming festive season on this platform. Sandhya Devanathan, VP, Meta in India, feels that business messaging is a big driver of growth, not just for Meta, but for businesses in the country. Devanathan also shed light on Meta India’s expectation from the festival season and how Gen AI is shaping their business.

Edited excerpts

You are bringing in Meta verified for small businesses in the country, customised messages on WhatsApp for businesses and then Bharat Yatra. That seems interesting. Tell us more.

Last year, we talked about how at Meta we are big supporters for businesses small and large and that it was an integral part of our strategy. The second was around how we think business messaging is a big driver of growth not just for Meta but for businesses in the country and that we'd continue to focus and invest on that and the third bit was around how Meta in India can be this crucible of innovation and drive leading edge innovative products.

This year’s announcements are a perfect amalgamation of all of those three. Within the chat of WhatsApp, we've heard from users that if they want to get something resolved really quickly, they'd like that option to call a business. So that's been introduced. You talked about ‘meta verified’. Now we have a 100 percent rollout across the country. Continuing our focus on not just messaging, but also on small businesses. Small businesses now have the ability to fine tune those messages to their target users. The last bit around innovation was really around the tools that we've introduced on AI using AI, which is AI assistance and AI agents. So you can see through the spread of all of this, we've focused across the board, but also how do we skill people? How do they know about it? And that's where the Bharat Yatra comes in.

And I'm personally excited about it. I am looking forward to being on the Bharat Yatra bus. So we're looking to do 10 cities, some 6,000 kilometres and 20,000 businesses. We have a long history of spending our time and our resources around skilling for India.

Last year, you spoke about how the kind of scale India offers provides a great testing ground for a company like Meta – that it is unparalleled and unmatched compared to any other market. Since you have taken charge of Meta in India, tell us about a successful product which was tested in the Indian market that has worked exceedingly well for Meta?

Flows. It is a perfect example of something that we built for India, seeing behaviour in India.

Then, of course, I want to speak about Meta AI. The largest market for Meta AI is India. We just launched Llama 3.1 and we announced that we had around 350 million downloads of the model and 20 million downloads just in the last month. Closer home, we're seeing Indian developers build on Llama. We're seeing some great companies with exciting case studies that are building on Llama. There's Parivahan, which does some pretty amazing things around education and affordable education and testing using Llama, and they've built it on Llama. Similarly, Kisan AI is another example of a great start-up in India built using Llama. So we're seeing use cases not just on our platform, but we're also seeing some pretty amazing stories of innovation play out with Llama.

How excited is Meta around the festive season? What are the advertisers excited about?

Very excited. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I was with the country's top marketers at our Meta Marketing Summit and one of the things that sort of really buoyed us was a lot of the feedback we were receiving from them about how well we're preparing them for the festive season with not just the product launches, but with the insights and the work we're doing together. So I'm really excited to see continued momentum heading into the festive season. One of the things I also wanted to add - we're also investing in working with businesses to better prepare them for the festive season. So we want them to think about how to make relevant messages, how to reach their customers - current and prospective - and how to read signals because we send them some signals around how they should be thinking so they don't spam customers.

How is AI and Gen AI shaping your business?

AI has been shaping our business for a very long time now. We've been in the midst of the AI revolution for a very long time. Right from 2006 when news feeds started, and your news feed started looking a little different from mine. We've used AI to power a lot of the experiences that you see on our platform for a long time now, whether it's keeping people safe or …. Almost 50 percent of all the content that you see on Instagram today is AI referred and AI recommended. Now coming to Gen AI, we just announced our Gen AI assistant and AI agents. But even before we did that, sometime two years or three years ago we launched our Advantage Plus, which is our AI suite of products.

And if you were sitting across from me last year, I would have said maybe 40 percent of our advertisers would have used any of our AI products. Today, almost every advertiser on our platform is taking advantage of the Advantage Plus suite of products, and they're seeing outsized returns. So it's not just how AI is used on our platform for our users and our businesses, but it's also how businesses are taking advantage of our AI tools to grow their business. So we're seeing both happen, and we're really delighted to see the kind of uptake and the results that we're seeing. I'll give you one stat because I love the stats.

We did some research that says that the digital spend returns in the country is around 1.4 or something to every rupee that you spend. But, if you look at Meta that number goes up to 1.79 and the reason it does that, I think in large part, is because of our Advantage Plus suite of products. So AI is definitely powering outsized returns for businesses on our platform.

Finally, when the global looks at Meta in India, is WhatsApp the shining star, the favourite child?

Actually for Meta in India, everything's a favourite shining star. We're seeing usage of Facebook, which is great. We're seeing Instagram reach new heights. We're seeing WhatsApp do super well. So across the board, there's momentum. In fact, I talked to you about LLama in terms of the number of downloads, the developer use cases, Meta AI now, Threads again, India's really large key priority market. So it is for WhatsApp channels. I could go on and on…but I will leave you with what I said the last time, the kind of scale that India offers is unparalleled. And that's why we remain a huge priority for Meta globally.

Watch out for the interview on Storyboard18 on CNBC-TV18.

Read More: Meta India's Sandhya Devanathan on AI, metaverse and opportunities that India provides