Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
An AI agent can answer on WhatsApp, with two constraints that shape what it should say: message length and the reply window.
Every Suite plan from Team upwards covers this. Without a Suite you need Support and Chat together with the Social Messaging add-on, which is the WhatsApp side rather than the AI side.
Connect it
- Build and test the AI agent first, in the test widget.
- In the AI agents workspace, click Dashboard in the sidebar.
- Hover over the agent and click Activate, or use Manage channels in the options menu if it is already live elsewhere.
- Select the WhatsApp channel in Manage your channels and click Save changes.
- Test from a real phone.
Only one AI agent can be active on a channel at a time, so this replaces whatever was answering on that WhatsApp number. There is no switch for answering only out of hours either: on a messaging channel the agent answers, and stepping back during opening hours is something you build with an Availability block.
Constraint one: message length
The message body for an AI agent in messaging tops out at 4,095 characters, and less again for templates and some message types. Past that the text is truncated rather than refused, so the customer gets an answer that stops mid-sentence and reads as a fault.
Instruct the agent to answer briefly on this channel, and check what arrives on a phone rather than in a preview.
Constraint two: the 24-hour window
You have 24 hours from the moment the customer's message arrives in the WhatsApp channel to reply. The clock starts there, not when the ticket was created, and after that a normal reply is not possible: it takes a pre-approved template message instead.
An AI agent answering promptly keeps the conversation inside that window, which is the real benefit here. A conversation it cannot resolve has to reach a person while the window is still open, so escalation matters more on WhatsApp than on the web: a handover after two hours of the AI trying is a handover into a closing window.
Set the tone for the medium
WhatsApp is informal and short. An answer written for a help centre article reads wrong here. Where you set communication guidelines, make the difference explicit.
Test on a phone
Not in a simulator. Length, line breaks and links all behave differently in the real app, and that is what your customers see.
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