A billion conversations a day
More than 1 billion active business conversations now happen every day across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. In late July, Mark Zuckerberg went further and predicted that billions of people will have personal AI agents within five years, as TechCrunch reported. If both numbers hold, the dominant interface between customers and businesses will not be a homepage. It will be a chat thread, often with software on both ends.
Meta is already monetizing that thesis. Its Business Agent, which went globally available on June 3, is used by more than 1 million businesses to answer questions, recommend products, book appointments, and qualify leads. Since August 1 it is priced at roughly 2 dollars per million tokens; CNBC calculates that a typical US conversation costs about 4 to 5 cents. Selling in chat now has a unit price.
Retail is moving in first
The big retailers are not waiting to see how this plays out. Fast Company's overview of agentic commerce tracks the moves: Sephora built a personal recommendation experience inside ChatGPT, Gap is working with Gemini on agent-driven shopping, and Walmart brought its own assistant, Sparky, into ChatGPT.
Walmart's numbers are the most instructive, because they cut both ways. Purchases completed inside chat convert about 3 times worse than purchases on Walmart's own site. Yet ChatGPT brings Walmart roughly twice as many new customers as traditional search does. Chat is a strong front door and, for now, a weak cash register.
The storefront splits, ownership should not
That asymmetry defines the sensible strategy. The storefront is no longer one place; it is a set of channels with different jobs. But brand control and customer data ownership still live on the property you own, your site. The chat channels borrow your catalog; they should not become the only place your customer relationship exists.
The failure mode is treating every channel as a full store. A chat thread that tries to replicate your whole site frustrates buyers and pollutes your data. A site that ignores chat hands its discovery traffic to competitors who show up in the assistant's answers.
How to set this up
Three decisions turn this from a trend into an operating model:
- Give each channel a role. Discovery and qualification in chat, support where the customer already is, checkout and account on your site. Write the role down; it decides what each channel is allowed to promise.
- Feed every channel the same product truth. Prices, availability, and descriptions must come from one source. An assistant quoting last month's price is worse than no assistant. A clean product feed is the unglamorous foundation of the whole setup.
- Measure the handoffs, not just the endpoints. Track how conversations start, where they escalate to a human, and which ones end on your site. Walmart's 3x conversion gap only became a usable insight because someone measured chat and site separately.
The storefront is becoming plural. The businesses that come out ahead will treat chat as a serious sales channel with its own economics, while keeping the system of record, the brand, and the customer data firmly on ground they own.