What Kunal Shah wants your WhatsApp to look like

Earlier in June this year, serial entrepreneur and leading investor Kunal Shah stepped down from his second venture, CRED, and joined global social media giant Meta to lead its messaging app, WhatsApp, globally. This move came alongside Meta agreeing to pump in $900 million in Series H funding for CRED through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases at a valuation of $4.5 billion.

Having spent a few months in the role, Shah posted his vision for the messaging platform on competitor platform X. He wrote that feedback from users over the past few months pointed to a desire for WhatsApp to help people stay close to those who matter to them and get more done on the platform.

On keeping the messaging app vibrant, Shah sees changes in areas such as voice notes, groups, more expressive stickers, and video creation tools. Second, he wants to extend WhatsApp into a payment and financial services interface for activities such as paying bills, borrowing, and staying connected while travelling. “We're working with financial services and telecom partners so that finishing something feels as easy as starting it,” he wrote.

Third, and more importantly, Shah wants WhatsApp to act as a personal agent that can book appointments or carry out instructions.

“Trust takes years to earn and a moment to lose, and I don't take that lightly. Whatever we build, WhatsApp must remain simple, reliable, and private. These principles we've had for years aren't changing. Your personal messages and calls stay end-to-end encrypted. This and our quality bar stays the same,” he further wrote.

With the platform handling over 100 billion messages and 2 billion calls every day, Shah intends to make people spend more time on the app and do more things.

In India, where it has the largest user base in the world—with an estimated 800 million-plus users—WhatsApp has been gaining ground in UPI payments share ever since the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) removed its onboarding cap in 2025. This year, the platform saw around 112.65 million transactions in January, worth ₹8,358.21 crore. By September, the volume had risen to around 192.07 million transactions, worth ₹14,656.22 crore. That said, it is still not among the top five UPI apps by transaction volume, and in terms of transaction value, it does not even feature among the top 10.

How is Meta looking at AI in commerce globally?

In July, during the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that Meta is embedding AI into almost everything, from improving the app experience for people to driving better performance for advertisers and internally innovating and shipping new products and features.

“We're developing new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead. We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we're building for large customers,” he said.

More recently, during the latest earnings call in October, Zuckerberg said, “WhatsApp is hitting all-time highs in messaging and is becoming an increasingly important platform for agents as well.”

On its recently launched personal agent, ‘Muse’, Meta says more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set it up for use, with the most common use cases being shopping, personal productivity and creativity. Meta also sees a big opportunity to tap small and medium-sized businesses with Muse. With an estimated 500-million-plus self-identified small businesses using Meta's family of apps to do business, Meta sees Muse helping these businesses acquire customers and operate more efficiently, while enabling people to complete transactions. Over time, consumer and business agents could connect and transact directly, creating opportunities around paid usage, commerce and business services.

In the short term, Meta admits that Muse is very compute-intensive and expects to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year. It also expects the product to become profitable once its revenue streams reach scale. “If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years. In the near term, the strength of our core business enables us to scale the Muse network before then,” said CFO Susan Li.

The implementation pathway in India

While making WhatsApp more appealing to users may be the easiest goal to achieve in India, realising the business potential of the messaging app, given its reach, remains to be tested. Muse has yet to be rolled out in India. The ability to cross-link platforms and run personalised agents that need information to deliver targeted ads or recommendations could once again raise privacy concerns. Moreover, Meta has been managing investigations and lawsuits in India regarding the 2021 updates to WhatsApp's terms of service and privacy policy, as well as its sharing of certain data with other Meta products and services. It currently has an appeal pending before the Supreme Court of India and is also appealing an order by the Competition Commission of India.

To build trust, the platform also needs to improve its ability to monitor bad actors. Ads and intrusive business-account spam are issues that WhatsApp users have been expressing frustration about on social media platforms.

Recently, amid an increase in cybercrime in the country, the Supreme Court, while hearing a suo motu case (In Re: Victims of Digital Arrest Related to Forged Documents), asked WhatsApp and other intermediaries to outline the steps they plan to take to prevent digital-arrest scams and tackle the growing menace of cybercrime. The court has been monitoring the increase in such scams. Scammers masquerading as police officers, investigative agencies or judicial officials use phone and video calls to coerce individuals into making substantial payments by falsely claiming that they are under investigation or liable to be arrested.