May 5, 2025 • 36 mins
"Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so. But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. It's why we're doing things like business messaging. It's why we built new features like channels and status and updates tab separate from your personal chats. We think that if we carry on getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more of these features that users want." - Alice Newton-Rex
Fresh out of the studio, Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President and Head of Product at WhatsApp, joins us to explore how the messaging platform balances innovation with privacy for over 3 billion users worldwide. In the conversation, Alice explained WhatsApp's three guiding principles: simple, reliable, and private. She emphasized that the features they say "no" to are often more important than those they approve, highlighting how WhatsApp has evolved beyond personal messaging to include business services that serve over 200 million businesses globally and balancing innovation with trust on how Meta AI is integrated into the platform. Last but not least, Alice describes what great would look like for WhatsApp continuing to be the most private way for people to communicate while maintaining simplicity and reliability at global scale.
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Alice Newton-Rex, VP & Head of Product, WhatsApp
[01:34] Alice's Career Journey from Classics to WhatsApp.
[04:32] WhatsApp's three core principles: simple, reliable, and private.
[06:43] Best product decisions: knowing when to say "no".
[09:43] Mobile-first strategy shapes WhatsApp's business model.
[11:21] Small businesses use WhatsApp extensively in emerging economies.
[13:58] WhatsApp Business ecosystem reaches 200 million users globally.
[16:02] End-to-end encryption forms foundation of WhatsApp's privacy commitment.
[18:38] Features keep core experience simple while adding optional functionalities.
[21:18] User trust prioritized over speed of iteration.
[24:32] Messaging will be how most people interact with AI.
[26:40] AI features: optional, visually distinct, with clear user control.
[32:53] Privacy enables authenticity in everyday communication.
[34:13] Future WhatsApp: keeping simple, reliable, private communication for billions.
[35:35] Closing.
Profile: Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President & Head of Product, WhatsApp
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alice-newton-rex-4713191a/
Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to
message the people in their life, and they should be able to
carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in
doing so. But we're increasingly seeing
that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close
friends and family. That's why we're doing things
like business messaging. That's why we built new features
like channels and status and updates tabs separate from your
personal chats. We think that if we carry on
(00:21):
getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives
us the opportunity to build moreof these features that users
want. Welcome to Analyse Asia, the
premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of
business, technology and media in Asia.
I'm Bernard Young and I often say that in a world of where
privacy is increasingly scrutinised, the true
(00:43):
differentiator for platforms is where how they balance
innovation with trust. How do we continue evolved
messaging in a way that is both intelligent and private?
With me today, Alice Newton Rex,Vice President and head of
product for WhatsApp to dive into this very question where I
explore how, what's that being used by?
I think probably if, if I get mysettings wrong, it's 2 billion
(01:06):
people globally. It's shaping the future of
private messaging, leveraging, of course, now method AI and
also empowering business across emerging markets.
Alice, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having
me on. Yeah, in.
Well, it's of course early morning in Singapore, so in
preparing for this interview I found out that we're both alumni
(01:26):
from Cambridge University, so inUK, not the other ones in
Boston. So to start with the origin
story, how do you begin your journey?
Yeah, well, when I was at Cambridge, I studied classics,
Latin and ancient Greek, as wellas the culture of those two
civilizations. And I think learning the ancient
languages was a really good background for the rigors of
later learning coding languages and learning about how people
(01:48):
lived in society is very different from my own was an
important grounding and the empathy that you need to build
products that will serve people in different countries all
around the world. I think lots of people
underestimate the benefits of aneducation in the humanities,
even if you're planning to have a technical career.
After my undergraduate degree I did a year long fellowship at
Harvard where I learned to code among other things and worked
with a group at MIT developing amobile health app for use in low
(02:11):
income settings. Then I came back to the UK and
started my career at EU KS, thennew Government Digital Service
where we set out to build publicservices online that was well
designed and easy to use as the best private sector digital
services. And after that, I joined a
Series A startup called World Remit, an app for international
(02:31):
money transfer, mostly for migrants sending money from the
US and Europe back to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Over the next five years, I led the product and design teams as
we grew the service to more than150 countries around the world
and the business to be worth billions of dollars.
And then I joined WhatsApp, initially to lead their product
team in the UK. WhatsApp has two engineering
(02:52):
sites in California and London. So that was how you ended up in
WhatsApp and subsequently from there you now bidding product,
right. So of course, given that you're
going through the government side and then you doing a lot of
work relating to messaging in the emerging markets case you
any lessons about your career journey so far?
(03:12):
Yeah, I think a lot of people see their career as a series of
stepping stones that they have to make it across to get to some
career goal they want. I think this is a mistake.
And in my experience, people accelerate faster when they work
on problems they really care about, rather than choosing
roles for some perceived future value to their career.
And look, even if that doesn't work out, at least you've always
(03:33):
been working on problems you care about.
You know, I didn't think for a moment when I joined WhatsApp
that within three years I would be the head of product, and I
definitely wasn't planning for that.
But I loved my job. That showed and I think it
contributed to me getting this role.
Oh yeah, I think there's a point.
Of course, usually it's the journey rather than the
destination itself. So I probably should get to the
main subject of the day. So I want to talk about WhatsApp
(03:55):
a little bit about business method and privacy.
WhatsApp is now more than a chatapp and it's probably essential
infrastructure in almost many parts of the world.
So I think for a start, how do you now think about
prioritizing, say product innovation for such AI?
Think it's pretty vast global and as you said before,
culturally diverse users. Yeah, I'm sure in in your
(04:19):
journey in looking at like, you know, different people user or
WhatsApp in Singapore, it's probably very different from
users in India or you know, maybe in Australia.
So talk about that. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, over 2 billion people
in more than 180 countries rely on WhatsApp every day, and we
take that responsibility really seriously.
(04:40):
So we always try to stay true tothree core principles as we
design the app, which is simple,reliable and private.
You'll probably hear me say those 3 words a lot today, and
so you'll be able to empathize with my team who also hear them
a lot. In fact, Simple, reliable
private is the name of my conference room in the office.
Sometimes I think you can't say something enough.
But let me say a bit more about what it means.
(05:02):
We think the app should be so simple that anyone anywhere
could use it. You know, people often tell me,
even my grandparents find it easy to use WhatsApp, which I
love. It needs to be so reliable that
it will work even if you're on abasic smartphone in rural India
with a poor data connection. But we've learned that if we
make it work even in the toughest circumstances, then it
actually works better for everyone.
Even if you're, say, a tech worker with the latest phone and
(05:25):
super high speed Wi-Fi in Singapore.
And it needs to be private because without privacy in your
communication, you aren't free to be yourself.
Not to mention that you're vulnerable to hackers or
criminals or anyone who wants tosteal your information.
So anything we build has to be designed with these three
principles in mind. And then in terms of picking
what to build, a huge part of our process is listening to our
users and understanding what things they want to do with the
(05:47):
product or what are they alreadytrying to use it for, but
getting stuck. Now, some people are only ever
going to want to use WhatsApp tomessage the people in their
life, and they should be able tocarry on doing that and have an
incredibly simple experience in doing so.
But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp
for more than messaging close friends and family.
That's why we're doing things like business messaging.
That's why we develop new features like channels and
(06:08):
status and updates tabs separatefrom your personal chats.
And we think that if we carry ongetting the core of private
messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more
of these features that users want.
So 1 interesting question because I also like product as
well. When you first step into like
being the VP of Product role, what was the steepest learning
(06:29):
curve in bleeding such, such a high impact platform?
Because I'm pretty sure, like it's what you say, the three or
three core principles, in order to make sure that everything has
to be right, has to be right because you're designing for so
many users in the world. Yeah, OK.
The steepest learning curve, I think it was probably this,
which is learning that the features you say no to are
(06:52):
probably more important than thefeatures you say yes to.
So it was such a massive and diverse user base.
It's easy to come up with, you know, 50 ideas for breakfast and
like, cool blue sky things that 10s of millions of people might
want to use. But that leaves a few billion
people who don't want them. And not only does that clutter
up the app, but it also distracts you from working on
the core things that people really care about.
(07:14):
Things that sometimes sound lessexciting, like driving up core
reliability or making small improvements to the user
journeys that collectively people are using billions of
times a day. Like recently we just made it a
little bit easier to send a reaction and it's had a major
impact to how people are using that.
Many more reactions are being sent.
So I have to say no to a lot of ideas and keep my team laser
(07:35):
focused on the things that most people really want, irrespective
of whether they're super noticeable like introducing
channels or AI, or very subtle, like improving the results when
you search for your contacts. I find the channels so part of
that, it was really interesting because they can actually get
information direct specifically when because I teach in the
university when I need to disseminate information to the
(07:57):
students. That's great side of the world.
So for context, can you give my audience, say, a snapshot of
Whatsapp's current product footprint?
I mean, I think a lot of people,I think probably started right
at the beginning when I first used was that it's just
basically sending private messages, having images and
videos. And today I think there's a lot
(08:19):
of business services. I myself also try to use it as
well. And what is it beyond just
personal and business services as well?
Yeah, well, at its core, WhatsApp is a private messaging
app for conversations between friends and family, and I think
that's the main WhatsApp we're all familiar with.
Outside of the Calls and Chats tab, the other most important
(08:39):
tab is the Updates tab, which iswhere you'll find status.
That's Whatsapp's Stories product for sharing updates from
your daily life with contacts and channels, which were
introduced in 2023 as a way to keep up to date with things that
you're interested in. Then we have the WhatsApp
Business app, which is a free app with more than 200 million
users made for small and medium businesses that allows them to
(09:01):
connect with their customers. And lastly, we have the WhatsApp
Business platform. So that's our product for larger
businesses that need a more scalable solution to connect
with their customers. People like an airline who might
be sending boarding passes to their users or e-commerce
company or a bank. And so people can either reach
out to receive support from a business like this or they opt
(09:21):
in to receive useful informationin return.
And we charge businesses to sendthese types of messages.
So I think in many countries, mobile is probably the primary
gateway to the Internet. I guess.
How do those usage patterns actually influence how you think
about the product? Because the entry point's
different. Yeah, you know, you're
(09:43):
absolutely right about mobile. And indeed, for many people
around the world, I think WhatsApp is really their
experience of the Internet that's definitely shaped our
business products. So for example, one of our two
major revenue lines is Click to WhatsApp ads.
These are ads that run on Facebook and Instagram.
When you click on them, instead of taking you to a business's
website, they take you directly into a WhatsApp chat with the
(10:03):
business. Because a lot of the businesses
we serve don't even have a website.
They just run their whole operation on WhatsApp.
So it's great for them to be able to advertise in a way that
suits their business. Then on the consumer side, we
design features with an awareness of people's mobile
behaviour. So in a lot of countries around
the world, including many in Asia, we know that users often
(10:25):
have more than one SIM and therefore more than one number
on their phone. So we gave them the ability to
have two numbers on WhatsApp that they can toggle between and
as well as people having 2 numbers on one phone in lower
income settings. Lots of people share phones
within a household and that makes some of our privacy
features so important, like a chat which allows you to hide
(10:45):
particularly personal chats so they don't appear in your inbox
and you enter a special PIN to access them.
Yeah. Well, OK.
That is interesting because I actually didn't thought about
use case such as like you, you can have a one house was
actually sharing one phone, but actually multiple users on that.
So like for example, have any kind of market specific
behaviours or trends actually like surprise you from a product
(11:09):
leadership standpoint, I guess specifically the emerging
economies. And if you didn't mention just
now about that particular feature, it didn't really cross
my mind why it is there on on that.
Yeah, well, you know, I spend most of my life in the UK, where
WhatsApp is ubiquitous for speaking to friends and family.
But when I travel to other countries, especially emerging
(11:31):
economies, I am often amazed at how much people use WhatsApp for
interacting with businesses. So this is true also in
Southeast Asia, especially countries like Indonesia,
Malaysia, also Singapore, where a lot of small businesses are
already using WhatsApp to connect with their customers,
whether that's like a local grocers or a petrol bonus or a
fashion outlet. And seeing this baby, you know,
(11:52):
this happened long before we ever had specific business
products, but it's what inspiredus to launch the WhatsApp
business app in 2018 and make iteasier for businesses to do the
things they were already trying to do.
So this version of WhatsApp has features like away messages
because you can't always be on as a business owner, or
catalogues, which lets them share their products easily.
(12:12):
I was trying to think of what would be a good consumer trend
to mention too. I think another one we've seen,
particularly in some emerging markets, is users prefer to send
voice messages over typing because they're fast and they're
easy and it lets you have a moreexpressive conversation.
But the problem with voice messages is the receivers don't
always like listening to them. Perhaps you know if you're on
the move or you're in a loud place, or you just get a long
(12:35):
voice message and you don't havetime to listen to it.
So for some of those moments, weintroduced a voice message
transcriptions last year, which turned the voice message into
text. So you can keep up with it
however you want. OK, I have not encountered that,
but I do know that there's an probably in China, most people
would do voice messaging much more often as compared to say
(12:56):
other parts of the world. So when even when I see Chinese
users using WhatsApp to communicate with me, they ended
up doing the same behaviour. But the transcription feature I
publish try to try to figure outhow to use that because I
actually, like you said, would prefer just pressing and see the
message rather than listening tothe message.
(13:17):
Yeah, what one more curious point.
So when I was in my previous role as ACIO, we were actually
looking at WhatsApp for Businessto actually do, to actually help
one of the subsidiaries to actually do something like a
customer relationship managementtool to engage for purchase of
new properties on that. And I think WhatsApp for
(13:37):
Business supports almost everything from, you know, very
small merchants, global to global enterprises like, you
know, Singapore Airlines. And now I receive my
notifications through them as well to WhatsApp.
How has this ecosystem has actually evolved, and what does
the current scale look like today?
(13:58):
Yeah. Well, I think you're right to
call out like the very differentkinds of of businesses using
WhatsApp for business. As I said, it all kind of kicked
off in 2018 that we started formally supporting businesses,
although in fact, they had been widespread on the platform for a
long, long time before that. And maybe a good way to
understand the scale is to look at what are some of the kinds of
businesses. So there's a small family
(14:19):
business called Ruley Silva thatmake customized jewelry,
specializing in wedding bands. And they're based in Jogo,
Jakarta in Indonesia. They've got just one small
physical store. But using the WhatsApp Business
app and it's various tools, they've been able to export
their jewellery all the way to places like Paris.
And it's not an isolated example.
You know, today there are more than 200 million users of the
(14:42):
WhatsApp Business app. Staying with Indonesia examples,
a large established organizationlike Bank Mandiri uses
Whatsapp's business platform to manage close to 10,000
interactions daily. Or when I was in India recently,
I bought a ticket for the Delhi Metro directly within a WhatsApp
thread like 10s of thousands of other people do all the time.
And this is happening at scale, you know, at WhatsApp kind of
(15:04):
scale all around the world. Yeah, I, and I forgot to mention
like for me because Saturday is to go to send all my kids as a
Grab driver across all the different tuition sectors.
But most of the tuition centres actually, I think I'm really on
communications actually to WhatsApp for any information
(15:24):
that's disseminated to us even down to say dealing with
payments. So I think it's pretty
ubiquitous in terms of how usersactually engaging businesses in
this part of the world. I'm quite curious.
I think WhatsApp is renowned forits commitment to privacy.
I think this is right in the beginning, even before it was
acquired by Matter. So how do you ensure like these
(15:48):
kind of new features, even like including say with AI to
actually still aligned with the foundational promise of privacy?
I think this is 11 area I think you are probably most qualified
to talk about. Yeah, I'm really pleased you
asked about that because privacyis at the heart of everything we
do. I mentioned it's in our kind of
Core 3 design principles and we use end to end encryption by
(16:12):
default to protect all your chats with friends, family,
colleagues so that no one else, not even WhatsApp and see them.
And that's the, you know, the very baseline of our privacy
promise. But we also look for ways to
make WhatsApp even more private on top of that.
And we think of these as adding additional layers of protection.
So in recent years, I'm thinkingof something like we added
disappearing messages and view wants messages so that
(16:34):
conversation disappear on a timer.
We've added a bunch of group controls, like the ability to
leave a group silently that was a hotly demanded 1, and also
control who can add you to a group.
We've given users more power to do things like decide who sees
when you're online and silence unknown callers.
And right now we're testing advanced chat privacy, which
(16:55):
will give users even more control over who can export your
chats or save media that you share with them in one to ones
and groups. But As for AI, you know Meta AI
only reads what you share with it, but your personal messages
remain end to end. Encrypted chats with AI are
visually indicated, so it's veryclear that they're different
from your personal messages and conversations.
(17:18):
Because we've had such great feedback on AI and WhatsApp so
far, we're continuing to exploreways to make it more useful,
maybe to give you help in writing your messages or reading
your noisy group chats. There are of course, major
technical challenges about how we can do this in a private way,
so we won't be releasing any features until we've innovative
enough behind the scenes to ensure that this can be done
(17:40):
while preserving the privacy of everyone's personal messages.
And also, I think I guess AI is a little bit more tricky because
you have the foundation models which are pretty large and it's,
it's actually requires quite a lot of service like computing
and this technical side, right? And also, for example, you will
probably just what we call smalllanguage models and then
probably from there until the best model comes along.
(18:02):
Maybe that would be a pretty useful when it goes into phones
itself. I guess the question that I'll
always have is, I think you already talked about the your
three key principles, right? And let's say you want to decide
whether a new feature was specifically any, anything,
let's say around privacy Ki. How does the principles guide
(18:25):
your team in terms of thinking about it so that it actually
adds values rather versus say introduce complexity on overall
for the product? Yeah.
I mean, I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think
it is like, you know, kind of central trade off decision that
we're always trying to make. And I guess the principle is if
(18:47):
you just want to use WhatsApp tomessage the people in your life,
then you should be able to do that and have a great experience
in doing so. It's so important that we
protect that core experience, but because we are always
listening to our users and we know that there are a lot of
other people who are eager to domore with their WhatsApp, we
want to be able to meet the mostimportant of those needs with
other optional experiences. So channels, which is one of the
(19:10):
biggest product changes I've LEDin this role is a good example I
think of how we approach this. We'd heard from a lot of people
that they wanted to be be able to keep up with topics and
organizations they were interested in alongside their
private messages. So we've built Channels as a one
way broadcast tool and we decided to put in the updates
tab so it would be separate fromyour private messages.
We also wanted to build the mostprivate version of this feature,
(19:34):
so for example, no one else can see which channels that you're
in and you're following. So even though it was an
interesting broadcast feature, we wanted to adhere to our
principles around privacy. And so far it's proved quite
popular. You know, some big use cases of
sports teams giving real time updates on matches,
entertainment like Indonesian Idol or Netflix, Governments
like the Singapore government, which has a big channel with
(19:56):
over 100,000 followers, some celebrities.
I loved your university example as well.
But it's not for everyone. And that's fine.
If you don't want to follow a single channel, you don't have
to and you're not going to see any channel updates.
So with WhatsApp, we want you toalways feel in control.
Actually, one of the best use ofthe use case that I do for my
students is because of because Iteach AI in the, you know, the
(20:18):
generative AI in the universities, both technical and
for businesses like this. And the field is changing so
much practically almost every week.
It's kind of almost become like my weekly channel to basically
send updated information to them.
So that that's great. I always tell them, you know,
whatever I teach you, probably next three months, something has
changed. So I made a commitment that we
(20:40):
will change whatever materials that we have.
That's change. We just send it to them across
WhatsApp. So this is the interesting part,
right? And actually, to be quite
honest, for me, when I watch WhatsApp, it's actually tending.
The iteration doesn't tend to beso fast.
What is the balance between say iterating on the product could
(21:02):
be fast, could be slow versus maintaining user trust?
I think especially working at your scale because it one
feature change can affect almosta lot of people and they are I
think different cultures may have different nuances in the
way how they used was that. Yeah, that's a great question.
I think the real answer is if weever encounter kind of a
(21:25):
conflict between iterating, especially trying to iterate
fast, and user trust, then we would pick user trust every
time. And that's quite rare in
technology companies. But would rather move more
slowly if we have to, if a feature needs more time to hit
our quality bar, or be as simple, reliable, and private as
what users expect and deserve from WhatsApp.
(21:46):
Having said that, getting improvements into the hands of
our users fast, That has been a big focus for me and the
WhatsApp leadership team since Itook on this role and we've
evolved the organization to makethat possible.
I think it's been working. We are shipping improvements
faster than ever before. We've had some recognition for
this. So for example, last year we
were one of fast companies, mostinnovative companies of the
year, which would have been kindof inconceivable for WhatsApp
(22:09):
only a few years ago. But but more important than
industry awards, we've had a huge amount of love from our
users for all of the new features we've bought them
lately, some of which they've been hoping for a long time,
whether it's core messaging features like editing messages
or the unread filter or featuresand updates to up like channels.
A great one we launched pretty recently this year is the
ability to add music to your status, and that's delighted a
(22:31):
lot of people. Yeah, I think I saw that that
one. That was that one.
I was trying to figure out how, I guess when I looked at every
product, I maybe it's just the products IB I always try to work
out exactly which, what kind of users are they intended for.
So I guess what is the one thingthat you know about privacy and
what's at that? Very few do.
(22:53):
I think very few people know howmuch work goes into building
Whatsapp's high levels of privacy, especially at our
scale. So encryption introduces big
technical challenges into features that otherwise seem
simple. For example, adding polls, which
is one of those features people have been asking for ages and we
did not too long ago because with encryption, so much happens
(23:13):
on the client side versus on theserver.
Another example maybe is, yeah, it's it was a that was a
learning curve as well, joining the organization.
But another example was adding end to end encrypted backups,
which was a big technical challenge if you consider the
over 100 billion messages are sent every day.
We were the first product at scale to introduce us, and then
Apple followed, which we thoughtwas great, but it required an
(23:35):
entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage.
But we were happy to invest in that work so that we could give
people more privacy. And of course, a lot of the, the
kind of innovations at this kindof skill, I think it's very
subtle and not many people realise, I think Facebook has
actually innovative, not just that, right, that even the
databases open computing as well.
(23:57):
And I think with AI like Llama, I know you've just launched
Llama Fall. So I guess now with method AI
integrated into the what's that?What is the mental model that's
going to be guiding AI within that?
I guess what are the most interesting use cases that will
be exciting from your webbage point when integrating AI into
(24:21):
messaging? Because I think that, like you
said just now, you know, the fact that people were just
thinking about what message you sent, maybe ask the AI to frame
the message on their. Yeah.
Yeah. So in many countries, as you
say, you can now chat with the Meta AI assistant directly in
WhatsApp. My personal belief is that
(24:41):
messaging will be the main way that people interact with AI in
the future. Cuz the promise of LMS is you
can find out anything or actually do anything just by
having a chat with an intelligent agent.
And we've designed WhatsApp for chatting.
So, you know, I also think WhatsApp can democratize AI by
making it available to a global audience, not just the usual
(25:01):
tech elites and early adopters. And we're already seeing the
signs of this, like better AI within WhatsApp is popular in
the US, but it's also been really popular in countries like
India, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia.
And I'm excited about how usefulit is and how it can help people
get things done in their daily lives.
So some of the popular use casesfor Met AI and WhatsApp are for
homework help, whether for yourself or your children.
(25:25):
Yeah, Yeah. No, I agree with that.
I agree with that, yeah. Yeah, or for recipe ideas and
other information seeking. Or sometimes people tell me
they're using things like somebody sent me a message about
this thing, help me understand what that thing is.
People are also using it to be creative.
That's another really interesting Ave.
So you can generate stickers or images of anything you like.
(25:46):
You can even generate images of yourself, which is pretty fun.
Like imagine me climbing Mount Everest or whatever.
And then lastly, there are big opportunities that AI is
creating for business messaging.So we see an opportunity for AI
assistance to help businesses ofany size benefit from able to
have closer, more engaging interactions with their
customers. And we're testing agents right
(26:07):
now with a small number of businesses in a few markets to
start including Singapore, Malaysia and in Tunisia in fact.
And we expect to scale more soon.
So I'm just excited to see wherewe can take it.
I. So I have two questions for
them, but I think I will go withmuch more interesting one first.
SO for the upcoming features, soyou're actually retesting things
(26:30):
like AI agents for businesses. How do you specifically say
design it for to enhance the say, user control safety within
WhatsApp itself? Yeah.
I mean, you know, user control and safety is like is paramount
when we're designing anything. I think, you know, specifically
in the case of the AI that businesses are using, a huge
(26:51):
part of it is making sure everybody understands what the
kind of nature of the conversation is.
So the user has to, the user gets information and has to
choose to continue to know that they're having a conversation
with an AI business. And the business is also doing
the same, knows that the AI can be responding on their behalf to
their customers. But kind of zooming out from the
AI agent specifically, you know,a lot of our safety work is done
(27:14):
in the back end, such as using machine learning to identify
spammers and scammers based on things like how many messages
are they sending per second? And then we can remove those bad
accounts. And you know, some of it's more
visible stuff like WhatsApp. It's fundamentally architected
to protect people from unwanted contact.
So you can't search for people or message them unless you have
(27:35):
their phone number. Whenever you get a message from
someone who isn't in your contacts, we've always asked you
right away if you want to block or report them.
And we've tried to enhance some of these safety features and
controls more recently. So, you know, maybe AI will help
people impersonate other people.But when somebody starts a
conversation with you now, we show a contacts card when you
get a message from someone you don't know.
(27:56):
And that will give you information like, is the phone
number saved in your phone book?What country is the number from?
Do you have any groups in common?
And these kinds of things help people decide whether they want
to continue the conversation or block the number.
And similarly, now we're giving people the option to silence all
unknown callers, since we know alot of scams take place via
calls. Yes.
And to be quite honest, I totally like a block feature.
(28:19):
When I get an unknown number, typically even it sounds
relatively well, I call innocentmessage.
Sometimes The thing is actually like scamming message, so I just
pass the block button just get it right over on the entry.
Surprisingly is the business account and actually like the
way how you're designed it in such a way.
When I press that button to justautomatically get everything
(28:41):
done and I think you're using even give me the option to press
delete the conversation as well.How do you then ensure safe
feature AI features because it requires to maybe get contacts
of your information to remain non intrusive and preserve that
kind of simplicity. That was that have.
I mean I'm not even talking about adding things like
hallucination as well because AIalso do have the propensity of
(29:03):
making errors as well. Yeah, I mean, I think firstly
and most importantly, all of ourAI features are optional.
So if you don't want to use themand you just want to keep
messaging the way you are today,you can totally do that.
I mentioned earlier that we try and make the chat with AI really
visually distinct, so it's clearto people that these are
different than their personal messages and conversations.
(29:25):
But in general, I actually thinkone of the interesting things is
that people like interacting with AI within WhatsApp because
they find it simple. You know they don't have to
download and learn some new app,they can just interact by
chatting in a thread the way they normally do.
They actually sometimes just usethe AI do casually do something,
you know like generate an image,generate a emoji bag and on
(29:48):
that. I guess.
Given now we are have well a lotof people talk about this year
as the year for AI agents and now of course being what's that
is now be becoming for increasingly more important for
state business and transactions.I guess what are some of the key
safety challenges that the product will be addressing from
your point of view? Yeah.
(30:09):
I mean, I think one big upcomingfeature that's going to be
really impactful for is usernames, which are going to
add an extra degree of privacy so that you don't need to share
your phone number when you're messaging someone, including
when you're messaging a business.
You know, we always make it clear to people when they are
chatting with the business and we let you block and report them
and share the reasons that you're doing that.
(30:29):
And we've got policies in place that businesses have to follow
about what they can or cannot sell or promote on WhatsApp.
And recently, we also launched Meta Verified, which is where we
verify that someone is the real business they say they are and
in return make it easier for businesses to build credibility
with their customers by getting a blue verified badge and
impersonation protection, among some other things.
(30:50):
Right. For example, Blue verified.
So how how does the user actually the business user
actually get access to it? Is it just basically registering
through your platform and basically make sure that they
upload the relevant documents tobasically verify that who they
are or some form of business know your customer?
Yeah, it's exactly that. So if you're a user of the
(31:12):
WhatsApp business app, you can go through our verification flow
where you need to provide some information about yourself and
then if we can verify you, will award you that verified blue
badge. And it comes with a bunch of
additional useful features for businesses as well.
So how would you now access a measure user trust, say
qualitatively or quantitatively within WhatsApp?
(31:33):
Itself, yeah, we hear from our users in in various ways, so we
get a ton of feedback and feature requests and people
telling us what they like or what they don't like within the
app itself using the feedback option.
That's how we originally heard alot about people wanting
reactions before we introduce that, for example, or.
In fact, we had a massive spike in feedback after we started a
(31:54):
gradual rollout of Meta AI in Indonesia, where vast numbers of
people who didn't have access yet got in touch to say they
wanted us to make it available to them immediately, which was
kind of encouraging. We also hear feedback on social
and we listen to those channels carefully.
And we travel to countries whereWhatsapp's used a lot to hear
from users on the ground. We think it's important to
(32:14):
everyone who's building WhatsAppto do the app so they can learn
from our users directly, even the leadership team.
You know, I've personally made recent trips to India, Mexico,
Brazil to do user research aboutthe app and our new features,
and nothing really compares to getting to talk to people in
person, see their context and just learn more about their
lives. So do you every in every trip we
(32:36):
go where there's Mexico, India, you come back, like with this
whole list of features on it. Yeah.
That, that you get it there. Your UAE is like, oh, like where
champagne was like, yeah. Yeah, every time.
So what is the one question you wish more people would ask you
about whether? I think I wish more people would
ask me why is privacy so important in communication?
(32:58):
Why is privacy so important then?
Well, thank you. You know, privacy protects
everyone, whether it's journalists talking to their
sources or conversations betweendoctors and patients, or when
you need to share your credit card number with your child.
I think the reality is all of our personal exchanges are at
risk from increasing threats posed by hackers, malware,
(33:19):
spyware companies and more. But it goes beyond that.
We believe in everyday privacy, not just privacy for the
hypersensitive conversations, because everyday privacy makes
you feel free to be yourself. You know, you wouldn't feel
comfortable being yourself if there was a camera in your
living room recording everythingyou did and said.
You wouldn't accept it in your physical life and you shouldn't
accept it in your digital life either.
(33:41):
Of course, end to end encryptionis the gold standard here.
But another nice example of everyday privacy on WhatsApp is
disappearing messages. You know, it's a relief to know
you can say what you want now and not have it hanging around
forever and ever into the future.
And as we launch that, it's growing hugely and now lots of
people have it turned on by default for all of their
conversations. Yeah, I do know that
specifically for younger kids, like teenagers, I think they
(34:03):
like to do that. So my traditional closing
question then, what does grade look like for what's that in the
next few years on the product and privacy?
I think it looks like continuingto be the best, most private way
that people can communicate and continuing to keep the apps
simple, reliable and private formore than 2 billion people.
(34:25):
And there's Many thanks for coming on the show.
I am talking about app that I think I've probably used at
least 10% of my day on a mobile phone.
So in closing, any recommendations which have
inspired you recently? I was trying to think if I
could, you know, how many like pithy ancestors, like business
books or something. But honestly, I'm the mother to
(34:45):
a two and four year old, so I read a lot of children's books
and I think that older ones are all of the best ones.
Like Doctor Seuss. You know, there are some great
life lessons in there. I don't know if you know all the
places you'll go, but the way ittalks about handling adversity
in life, so I think that's brilliant.
Believe it or not, I think children's books from the UK are
actually better than most. Part of the world.
(35:07):
Yeah, like Jeffrey Orlas and I think the other the, the forgot
the other lady who actually writes very good books on that.
That's great. So how can my audience find you?
Well, I'm on LinkedIn as Alice Newton Rex, or if you're
interested in getting more news about everything exciting coming
up on WhatsApp and all of the features my team and I are
working on, you can follow the official WhatsApp channel as
(35:29):
well as the at WhatsApp handle and at WhatsApp business handles
on Instagram X or Facebook. And you can definitely find a
podcast anywhere from YouTube toSpotify.
And of course, drop us the feedback on any channel that you
want to. So, Alice, man, thanks for
coming on the show and thank youfor sharing, sharing a lot of
(35:52):
what you're building there todaywith us.
Yeah. Thank you too.
Thanks.
Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to
message the people in their life, and they should be able to
carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in
doing so. But we're increasingly seeing
that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close
friends and family. That's why we're doing things
like business messaging. That's why we built new features
like channels and status and updates tabs separate from your
personal chats. We think that if we carry on
(00:21):
getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives
us the opportunity to build moreof these features that users
want. Welcome to Analyse Asia, the
premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of
business, technology and media in Asia.
I'm Bernard Young and I often say that in a world of where
privacy is increasingly scrutinised, the true
(00:43):
differentiator for platforms is where how they balance
innovation with trust. How do we continue evolved
messaging in a way that is both intelligent and private?
With me today, Alice Newton Rex,Vice President and head of
product for WhatsApp to dive into this very question where I
explore how, what's that being used by?
I think probably if, if I get mysettings wrong, it's 2 billion
(01:06):
people globally. It's shaping the future of
private messaging, leveraging, of course, now method AI and
also empowering business across emerging markets.
Alice, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having
me on. Yeah, in.
Well, it's of course early morning in Singapore, so in
preparing for this interview I found out that we're both alumni
(01:26):
from Cambridge University, so inUK, not the other ones in
Boston. So to start with the origin
story, how do you begin your journey?
Yeah, well, when I was at Cambridge, I studied classics,
Latin and ancient Greek, as wellas the culture of those two
civilizations. And I think learning the ancient
languages was a really good background for the rigors of
later learning coding languages and learning about how people
(01:48):
lived in society is very different from my own was an
important grounding and the empathy that you need to build
products that will serve people in different countries all
around the world. I think lots of people
underestimate the benefits of aneducation in the humanities,
even if you're planning to have a technical career.
After my undergraduate degree I did a year long fellowship at
Harvard where I learned to code among other things and worked
with a group at MIT developing amobile health app for use in low
(02:11):
income settings. Then I came back to the UK and
started my career at EU KS, thennew Government Digital Service
where we set out to build publicservices online that was well
designed and easy to use as the best private sector digital
services. And after that, I joined a
Series A startup called World Remit, an app for international
(02:31):
money transfer, mostly for migrants sending money from the
US and Europe back to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Over the next five years, I led the product and design teams as
we grew the service to more than150 countries around the world
and the business to be worth billions of dollars.
And then I joined WhatsApp, initially to lead their product
team in the UK. WhatsApp has two engineering
(02:52):
sites in California and London. So that was how you ended up in
WhatsApp and subsequently from there you now bidding product,
right. So of course, given that you're
going through the government side and then you doing a lot of
work relating to messaging in the emerging markets case you
any lessons about your career journey so far?
(03:12):
Yeah, I think a lot of people see their career as a series of
stepping stones that they have to make it across to get to some
career goal they want. I think this is a mistake.
And in my experience, people accelerate faster when they work
on problems they really care about, rather than choosing
roles for some perceived future value to their career.
And look, even if that doesn't work out, at least you've always
(03:33):
been working on problems you care about.
You know, I didn't think for a moment when I joined WhatsApp
that within three years I would be the head of product, and I
definitely wasn't planning for that.
But I loved my job. That showed and I think it
contributed to me getting this role.
Oh yeah, I think there's a point.
Of course, usually it's the journey rather than the
destination itself. So I probably should get to the
main subject of the day. So I want to talk about WhatsApp
(03:55):
a little bit about business method and privacy.
WhatsApp is now more than a chatapp and it's probably essential
infrastructure in almost many parts of the world.
So I think for a start, how do you now think about
prioritizing, say product innovation for such AI?
Think it's pretty vast global and as you said before,
culturally diverse users. Yeah, I'm sure in in your
(04:19):
journey in looking at like, you know, different people user or
WhatsApp in Singapore, it's probably very different from
users in India or you know, maybe in Australia.
So talk about that. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, over 2 billion people
in more than 180 countries rely on WhatsApp every day, and we
take that responsibility really seriously.
(04:40):
So we always try to stay true tothree core principles as we
design the app, which is simple,reliable and private.
You'll probably hear me say those 3 words a lot today, and
so you'll be able to empathize with my team who also hear them
a lot. In fact, Simple, reliable
private is the name of my conference room in the office.
Sometimes I think you can't say something enough.
But let me say a bit more about what it means.
(05:02):
We think the app should be so simple that anyone anywhere
could use it. You know, people often tell me,
even my grandparents find it easy to use WhatsApp, which I
love. It needs to be so reliable that
it will work even if you're on abasic smartphone in rural India
with a poor data connection. But we've learned that if we
make it work even in the toughest circumstances, then it
actually works better for everyone.
Even if you're, say, a tech worker with the latest phone and
(05:25):
super high speed Wi-Fi in Singapore.
And it needs to be private because without privacy in your
communication, you aren't free to be yourself.
Not to mention that you're vulnerable to hackers or
criminals or anyone who wants tosteal your information.
So anything we build has to be designed with these three
principles in mind. And then in terms of picking
what to build, a huge part of our process is listening to our
users and understanding what things they want to do with the
(05:47):
product or what are they alreadytrying to use it for, but
getting stuck. Now, some people are only ever
going to want to use WhatsApp tomessage the people in their
life, and they should be able tocarry on doing that and have an
incredibly simple experience in doing so.
But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp
for more than messaging close friends and family.
That's why we're doing things like business messaging.
That's why we develop new features like channels and
(06:08):
status and updates tabs separatefrom your personal chats.
And we think that if we carry ongetting the core of private
messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more
of these features that users want.
So 1 interesting question because I also like product as
well. When you first step into like
being the VP of Product role, what was the steepest learning
(06:29):
curve in bleeding such, such a high impact platform?
Because I'm pretty sure, like it's what you say, the three or
three core principles, in order to make sure that everything has
to be right, has to be right because you're designing for so
many users in the world. Yeah, OK.
The steepest learning curve, I think it was probably this,
which is learning that the features you say no to are
(06:52):
probably more important than thefeatures you say yes to.
So it was such a massive and diverse user base.
It's easy to come up with, you know, 50 ideas for breakfast and
like, cool blue sky things that 10s of millions of people might
want to use. But that leaves a few billion
people who don't want them. And not only does that clutter
up the app, but it also distracts you from working on
the core things that people really care about.
(07:14):
Things that sometimes sound lessexciting, like driving up core
reliability or making small improvements to the user
journeys that collectively people are using billions of
times a day. Like recently we just made it a
little bit easier to send a reaction and it's had a major
impact to how people are using that.
Many more reactions are being sent.
So I have to say no to a lot of ideas and keep my team laser
(07:35):
focused on the things that most people really want, irrespective
of whether they're super noticeable like introducing
channels or AI, or very subtle, like improving the results when
you search for your contacts. I find the channels so part of
that, it was really interesting because they can actually get
information direct specifically when because I teach in the
university when I need to disseminate information to the
(07:57):
students. That's great side of the world.
So for context, can you give my audience, say, a snapshot of
Whatsapp's current product footprint?
I mean, I think a lot of people,I think probably started right
at the beginning when I first used was that it's just
basically sending private messages, having images and
videos. And today I think there's a lot
(08:19):
of business services. I myself also try to use it as
well. And what is it beyond just
personal and business services as well?
Yeah, well, at its core, WhatsApp is a private messaging
app for conversations between friends and family, and I think
that's the main WhatsApp we're all familiar with.
Outside of the Calls and Chats tab, the other most important
(08:39):
tab is the Updates tab, which iswhere you'll find status.
That's Whatsapp's Stories product for sharing updates from
your daily life with contacts and channels, which were
introduced in 2023 as a way to keep up to date with things that
you're interested in. Then we have the WhatsApp
Business app, which is a free app with more than 200 million
users made for small and medium businesses that allows them to
(09:01):
connect with their customers. And lastly, we have the WhatsApp
Business platform. So that's our product for larger
businesses that need a more scalable solution to connect
with their customers. People like an airline who might
be sending boarding passes to their users or e-commerce
company or a bank. And so people can either reach
out to receive support from a business like this or they opt
(09:21):
in to receive useful informationin return.
And we charge businesses to sendthese types of messages.
So I think in many countries, mobile is probably the primary
gateway to the Internet. I guess.
How do those usage patterns actually influence how you think
about the product? Because the entry point's
different. Yeah, you know, you're
(09:43):
absolutely right about mobile. And indeed, for many people
around the world, I think WhatsApp is really their
experience of the Internet that's definitely shaped our
business products. So for example, one of our two
major revenue lines is Click to WhatsApp ads.
These are ads that run on Facebook and Instagram.
When you click on them, instead of taking you to a business's
website, they take you directly into a WhatsApp chat with the
(10:03):
business. Because a lot of the businesses
we serve don't even have a website.
They just run their whole operation on WhatsApp.
So it's great for them to be able to advertise in a way that
suits their business. Then on the consumer side, we
design features with an awareness of people's mobile
behaviour. So in a lot of countries around
the world, including many in Asia, we know that users often
(10:25):
have more than one SIM and therefore more than one number
on their phone. So we gave them the ability to
have two numbers on WhatsApp that they can toggle between and
as well as people having 2 numbers on one phone in lower
income settings. Lots of people share phones
within a household and that makes some of our privacy
features so important, like a chat which allows you to hide
(10:45):
particularly personal chats so they don't appear in your inbox
and you enter a special PIN to access them.
Yeah. Well, OK.
That is interesting because I actually didn't thought about
use case such as like you, you can have a one house was
actually sharing one phone, but actually multiple users on that.
So like for example, have any kind of market specific
behaviours or trends actually like surprise you from a product
(11:09):
leadership standpoint, I guess specifically the emerging
economies. And if you didn't mention just
now about that particular feature, it didn't really cross
my mind why it is there on on that.
Yeah, well, you know, I spend most of my life in the UK, where
WhatsApp is ubiquitous for speaking to friends and family.
But when I travel to other countries, especially emerging
(11:31):
economies, I am often amazed at how much people use WhatsApp for
interacting with businesses. So this is true also in
Southeast Asia, especially countries like Indonesia,
Malaysia, also Singapore, where a lot of small businesses are
already using WhatsApp to connect with their customers,
whether that's like a local grocers or a petrol bonus or a
fashion outlet. And seeing this baby, you know,
(11:52):
this happened long before we ever had specific business
products, but it's what inspiredus to launch the WhatsApp
business app in 2018 and make iteasier for businesses to do the
things they were already trying to do.
So this version of WhatsApp has features like away messages
because you can't always be on as a business owner, or
catalogues, which lets them share their products easily.
(12:12):
I was trying to think of what would be a good consumer trend
to mention too. I think another one we've seen,
particularly in some emerging markets, is users prefer to send
voice messages over typing because they're fast and they're
easy and it lets you have a moreexpressive conversation.
But the problem with voice messages is the receivers don't
always like listening to them. Perhaps you know if you're on
the move or you're in a loud place, or you just get a long
(12:35):
voice message and you don't havetime to listen to it.
So for some of those moments, weintroduced a voice message
transcriptions last year, which turned the voice message into
text. So you can keep up with it
however you want. OK, I have not encountered that,
but I do know that there's an probably in China, most people
would do voice messaging much more often as compared to say
(12:56):
other parts of the world. So when even when I see Chinese
users using WhatsApp to communicate with me, they ended
up doing the same behaviour. But the transcription feature I
publish try to try to figure outhow to use that because I
actually, like you said, would prefer just pressing and see the
message rather than listening tothe message.
(13:17):
Yeah, what one more curious point.
So when I was in my previous role as ACIO, we were actually
looking at WhatsApp for Businessto actually do, to actually help
one of the subsidiaries to actually do something like a
customer relationship managementtool to engage for purchase of
new properties on that. And I think WhatsApp for
(13:37):
Business supports almost everything from, you know, very
small merchants, global to global enterprises like, you
know, Singapore Airlines. And now I receive my
notifications through them as well to WhatsApp.
How has this ecosystem has actually evolved, and what does
the current scale look like today?
(13:58):
Yeah. Well, I think you're right to
call out like the very differentkinds of of businesses using
WhatsApp for business. As I said, it all kind of kicked
off in 2018 that we started formally supporting businesses,
although in fact, they had been widespread on the platform for a
long, long time before that. And maybe a good way to
understand the scale is to look at what are some of the kinds of
businesses. So there's a small family
(14:19):
business called Ruley Silva thatmake customized jewelry,
specializing in wedding bands. And they're based in Jogo,
Jakarta in Indonesia. They've got just one small
physical store. But using the WhatsApp Business
app and it's various tools, they've been able to export
their jewellery all the way to places like Paris.
And it's not an isolated example.
You know, today there are more than 200 million users of the
(14:42):
WhatsApp Business app. Staying with Indonesia examples,
a large established organizationlike Bank Mandiri uses
Whatsapp's business platform to manage close to 10,000
interactions daily. Or when I was in India recently,
I bought a ticket for the Delhi Metro directly within a WhatsApp
thread like 10s of thousands of other people do all the time.
And this is happening at scale, you know, at WhatsApp kind of
(15:04):
scale all around the world. Yeah, I, and I forgot to mention
like for me because Saturday is to go to send all my kids as a
Grab driver across all the different tuition sectors.
But most of the tuition centres actually, I think I'm really on
communications actually to WhatsApp for any information
(15:24):
that's disseminated to us even down to say dealing with
payments. So I think it's pretty
ubiquitous in terms of how usersactually engaging businesses in
this part of the world. I'm quite curious.
I think WhatsApp is renowned forits commitment to privacy.
I think this is right in the beginning, even before it was
acquired by Matter. So how do you ensure like these
(15:48):
kind of new features, even like including say with AI to
actually still aligned with the foundational promise of privacy?
I think this is 11 area I think you are probably most qualified
to talk about. Yeah, I'm really pleased you
asked about that because privacyis at the heart of everything we
do. I mentioned it's in our kind of
Core 3 design principles and we use end to end encryption by
(16:12):
default to protect all your chats with friends, family,
colleagues so that no one else, not even WhatsApp and see them.
And that's the, you know, the very baseline of our privacy
promise. But we also look for ways to
make WhatsApp even more private on top of that.
And we think of these as adding additional layers of protection.
So in recent years, I'm thinkingof something like we added
disappearing messages and view wants messages so that
(16:34):
conversation disappear on a timer.
We've added a bunch of group controls, like the ability to
leave a group silently that was a hotly demanded 1, and also
control who can add you to a group.
We've given users more power to do things like decide who sees
when you're online and silence unknown callers.
And right now we're testing advanced chat privacy, which
(16:55):
will give users even more control over who can export your
chats or save media that you share with them in one to ones
and groups. But As for AI, you know Meta AI
only reads what you share with it, but your personal messages
remain end to end. Encrypted chats with AI are
visually indicated, so it's veryclear that they're different
from your personal messages and conversations.
(17:18):
Because we've had such great feedback on AI and WhatsApp so
far, we're continuing to exploreways to make it more useful,
maybe to give you help in writing your messages or reading
your noisy group chats. There are of course, major
technical challenges about how we can do this in a private way,
so we won't be releasing any features until we've innovative
enough behind the scenes to ensure that this can be done
(17:40):
while preserving the privacy of everyone's personal messages.
And also, I think I guess AI is a little bit more tricky because
you have the foundation models which are pretty large and it's,
it's actually requires quite a lot of service like computing
and this technical side, right? And also, for example, you will
probably just what we call smalllanguage models and then
probably from there until the best model comes along.
(18:02):
Maybe that would be a pretty useful when it goes into phones
itself. I guess the question that I'll
always have is, I think you already talked about the your
three key principles, right? And let's say you want to decide
whether a new feature was specifically any, anything,
let's say around privacy Ki. How does the principles guide
(18:25):
your team in terms of thinking about it so that it actually
adds values rather versus say introduce complexity on overall
for the product? Yeah.
I mean, I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think
it is like, you know, kind of central trade off decision that
we're always trying to make. And I guess the principle is if
(18:47):
you just want to use WhatsApp tomessage the people in your life,
then you should be able to do that and have a great experience
in doing so. It's so important that we
protect that core experience, but because we are always
listening to our users and we know that there are a lot of
other people who are eager to domore with their WhatsApp, we
want to be able to meet the mostimportant of those needs with
other optional experiences. So channels, which is one of the
(19:10):
biggest product changes I've LEDin this role is a good example I
think of how we approach this. We'd heard from a lot of people
that they wanted to be be able to keep up with topics and
organizations they were interested in alongside their
private messages. So we've built Channels as a one
way broadcast tool and we decided to put in the updates
tab so it would be separate fromyour private messages.
We also wanted to build the mostprivate version of this feature,
(19:34):
so for example, no one else can see which channels that you're
in and you're following. So even though it was an
interesting broadcast feature, we wanted to adhere to our
principles around privacy. And so far it's proved quite
popular. You know, some big use cases of
sports teams giving real time updates on matches,
entertainment like Indonesian Idol or Netflix, Governments
like the Singapore government, which has a big channel with
(19:56):
over 100,000 followers, some celebrities.
I loved your university example as well.
But it's not for everyone. And that's fine.
If you don't want to follow a single channel, you don't have
to and you're not going to see any channel updates.
So with WhatsApp, we want you toalways feel in control.
Actually, one of the best use ofthe use case that I do for my
students is because of because Iteach AI in the, you know, the
(20:18):
generative AI in the universities, both technical and
for businesses like this. And the field is changing so
much practically almost every week.
It's kind of almost become like my weekly channel to basically
send updated information to them.
So that that's great. I always tell them, you know,
whatever I teach you, probably next three months, something has
changed. So I made a commitment that we
(20:40):
will change whatever materials that we have.
That's change. We just send it to them across
WhatsApp. So this is the interesting part,
right? And actually, to be quite
honest, for me, when I watch WhatsApp, it's actually tending.
The iteration doesn't tend to beso fast.
What is the balance between say iterating on the product could
(21:02):
be fast, could be slow versus maintaining user trust?
I think especially working at your scale because it one
feature change can affect almosta lot of people and they are I
think different cultures may have different nuances in the
way how they used was that. Yeah, that's a great question.
I think the real answer is if weever encounter kind of a
(21:25):
conflict between iterating, especially trying to iterate
fast, and user trust, then we would pick user trust every
time. And that's quite rare in
technology companies. But would rather move more
slowly if we have to, if a feature needs more time to hit
our quality bar, or be as simple, reliable, and private as
what users expect and deserve from WhatsApp.
(21:46):
Having said that, getting improvements into the hands of
our users fast, That has been a big focus for me and the
WhatsApp leadership team since Itook on this role and we've
evolved the organization to makethat possible.
I think it's been working. We are shipping improvements
faster than ever before. We've had some recognition for
this. So for example, last year we
were one of fast companies, mostinnovative companies of the
year, which would have been kindof inconceivable for WhatsApp
(22:09):
only a few years ago. But but more important than
industry awards, we've had a huge amount of love from our
users for all of the new features we've bought them
lately, some of which they've been hoping for a long time,
whether it's core messaging features like editing messages
or the unread filter or featuresand updates to up like channels.
A great one we launched pretty recently this year is the
ability to add music to your status, and that's delighted a
(22:31):
lot of people. Yeah, I think I saw that that
one. That was that one.
I was trying to figure out how, I guess when I looked at every
product, I maybe it's just the products IB I always try to work
out exactly which, what kind of users are they intended for.
So I guess what is the one thingthat you know about privacy and
what's at that? Very few do.
(22:53):
I think very few people know howmuch work goes into building
Whatsapp's high levels of privacy, especially at our
scale. So encryption introduces big
technical challenges into features that otherwise seem
simple. For example, adding polls, which
is one of those features people have been asking for ages and we
did not too long ago because with encryption, so much happens
(23:13):
on the client side versus on theserver.
Another example maybe is, yeah, it's it was a that was a
learning curve as well, joining the organization.
But another example was adding end to end encrypted backups,
which was a big technical challenge if you consider the
over 100 billion messages are sent every day.
We were the first product at scale to introduce us, and then
Apple followed, which we thoughtwas great, but it required an
(23:35):
entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage.
But we were happy to invest in that work so that we could give
people more privacy. And of course, a lot of the, the
kind of innovations at this kindof skill, I think it's very
subtle and not many people realise, I think Facebook has
actually innovative, not just that, right, that even the
databases open computing as well.
(23:57):
And I think with AI like Llama, I know you've just launched
Llama Fall. So I guess now with method AI
integrated into the what's that?What is the mental model that's
going to be guiding AI within that?
I guess what are the most interesting use cases that will
be exciting from your webbage point when integrating AI into
(24:21):
messaging? Because I think that, like you
said just now, you know, the fact that people were just
thinking about what message you sent, maybe ask the AI to frame
the message on their. Yeah.
Yeah. So in many countries, as you
say, you can now chat with the Meta AI assistant directly in
WhatsApp. My personal belief is that
(24:41):
messaging will be the main way that people interact with AI in
the future. Cuz the promise of LMS is you
can find out anything or actually do anything just by
having a chat with an intelligent agent.
And we've designed WhatsApp for chatting.
So, you know, I also think WhatsApp can democratize AI by
making it available to a global audience, not just the usual
(25:01):
tech elites and early adopters. And we're already seeing the
signs of this, like better AI within WhatsApp is popular in
the US, but it's also been really popular in countries like
India, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia.
And I'm excited about how usefulit is and how it can help people
get things done in their daily lives.
So some of the popular use casesfor Met AI and WhatsApp are for
homework help, whether for yourself or your children.
(25:25):
Yeah, Yeah. No, I agree with that.
I agree with that, yeah. Yeah, or for recipe ideas and
other information seeking. Or sometimes people tell me
they're using things like somebody sent me a message about
this thing, help me understand what that thing is.
People are also using it to be creative.
That's another really interesting Ave.
So you can generate stickers or images of anything you like.
(25:46):
You can even generate images of yourself, which is pretty fun.
Like imagine me climbing Mount Everest or whatever.
And then lastly, there are big opportunities that AI is
creating for business messaging.So we see an opportunity for AI
assistance to help businesses ofany size benefit from able to
have closer, more engaging interactions with their
customers. And we're testing agents right
(26:07):
now with a small number of businesses in a few markets to
start including Singapore, Malaysia and in Tunisia in fact.
And we expect to scale more soon.
So I'm just excited to see wherewe can take it.
I. So I have two questions for
them, but I think I will go withmuch more interesting one first.
SO for the upcoming features, soyou're actually retesting things
(26:30):
like AI agents for businesses. How do you specifically say
design it for to enhance the say, user control safety within
WhatsApp itself? Yeah.
I mean, you know, user control and safety is like is paramount
when we're designing anything. I think, you know, specifically
in the case of the AI that businesses are using, a huge
(26:51):
part of it is making sure everybody understands what the
kind of nature of the conversation is.
So the user has to, the user gets information and has to
choose to continue to know that they're having a conversation
with an AI business. And the business is also doing
the same, knows that the AI can be responding on their behalf to
their customers. But kind of zooming out from the
AI agent specifically, you know,a lot of our safety work is done
(27:14):
in the back end, such as using machine learning to identify
spammers and scammers based on things like how many messages
are they sending per second? And then we can remove those bad
accounts. And you know, some of it's more
visible stuff like WhatsApp. It's fundamentally architected
to protect people from unwanted contact.
So you can't search for people or message them unless you have
(27:35):
their phone number. Whenever you get a message from
someone who isn't in your contacts, we've always asked you
right away if you want to block or report them.
And we've tried to enhance some of these safety features and
controls more recently. So, you know, maybe AI will help
people impersonate other people.But when somebody starts a
conversation with you now, we show a contacts card when you
get a message from someone you don't know.
(27:56):
And that will give you information like, is the phone
number saved in your phone book?What country is the number from?
Do you have any groups in common?
And these kinds of things help people decide whether they want
to continue the conversation or block the number.
And similarly, now we're giving people the option to silence all
unknown callers, since we know alot of scams take place via
calls. Yes.
And to be quite honest, I totally like a block feature.
(28:19):
When I get an unknown number, typically even it sounds
relatively well, I call innocentmessage.
Sometimes The thing is actually like scamming message, so I just
pass the block button just get it right over on the entry.
Surprisingly is the business account and actually like the
way how you're designed it in such a way.
When I press that button to justautomatically get everything
(28:41):
done and I think you're using even give me the option to press
delete the conversation as well.How do you then ensure safe
feature AI features because it requires to maybe get contacts
of your information to remain non intrusive and preserve that
kind of simplicity. That was that have.
I mean I'm not even talking about adding things like
hallucination as well because AIalso do have the propensity of
(29:03):
making errors as well. Yeah, I mean, I think firstly
and most importantly, all of ourAI features are optional.
So if you don't want to use themand you just want to keep
messaging the way you are today,you can totally do that.
I mentioned earlier that we try and make the chat with AI really
visually distinct, so it's clearto people that these are
different than their personal messages and conversations.
(29:25):
But in general, I actually thinkone of the interesting things is
that people like interacting with AI within WhatsApp because
they find it simple. You know they don't have to
download and learn some new app,they can just interact by
chatting in a thread the way they normally do.
They actually sometimes just usethe AI do casually do something,
you know like generate an image,generate a emoji bag and on
(29:48):
that. I guess.
Given now we are have well a lotof people talk about this year
as the year for AI agents and now of course being what's that
is now be becoming for increasingly more important for
state business and transactions.I guess what are some of the key
safety challenges that the product will be addressing from
your point of view? Yeah.
(30:09):
I mean, I think one big upcomingfeature that's going to be
really impactful for is usernames, which are going to
add an extra degree of privacy so that you don't need to share
your phone number when you're messaging someone, including
when you're messaging a business.
You know, we always make it clear to people when they are
chatting with the business and we let you block and report them
and share the reasons that you're doing that.
(30:29):
And we've got policies in place that businesses have to follow
about what they can or cannot sell or promote on WhatsApp.
And recently, we also launched Meta Verified, which is where we
verify that someone is the real business they say they are and
in return make it easier for businesses to build credibility
with their customers by getting a blue verified badge and
impersonation protection, among some other things.
(30:50):
Right. For example, Blue verified.
So how how does the user actually the business user
actually get access to it? Is it just basically registering
through your platform and basically make sure that they
upload the relevant documents tobasically verify that who they
are or some form of business know your customer?
Yeah, it's exactly that. So if you're a user of the
(31:12):
WhatsApp business app, you can go through our verification flow
where you need to provide some information about yourself and
then if we can verify you, will award you that verified blue
badge. And it comes with a bunch of
additional useful features for businesses as well.
So how would you now access a measure user trust, say
qualitatively or quantitatively within WhatsApp?
(31:33):
Itself, yeah, we hear from our users in in various ways, so we
get a ton of feedback and feature requests and people
telling us what they like or what they don't like within the
app itself using the feedback option.
That's how we originally heard alot about people wanting
reactions before we introduce that, for example, or.
In fact, we had a massive spike in feedback after we started a
(31:54):
gradual rollout of Meta AI in Indonesia, where vast numbers of
people who didn't have access yet got in touch to say they
wanted us to make it available to them immediately, which was
kind of encouraging. We also hear feedback on social
and we listen to those channels carefully.
And we travel to countries whereWhatsapp's used a lot to hear
from users on the ground. We think it's important to
(32:14):
everyone who's building WhatsAppto do the app so they can learn
from our users directly, even the leadership team.
You know, I've personally made recent trips to India, Mexico,
Brazil to do user research aboutthe app and our new features,
and nothing really compares to getting to talk to people in
person, see their context and just learn more about their
lives. So do you every in every trip we
(32:36):
go where there's Mexico, India, you come back, like with this
whole list of features on it. Yeah.
That, that you get it there. Your UAE is like, oh, like where
champagne was like, yeah. Yeah, every time.
So what is the one question you wish more people would ask you
about whether? I think I wish more people would
ask me why is privacy so important in communication?
(32:58):
Why is privacy so important then?
Well, thank you. You know, privacy protects
everyone, whether it's journalists talking to their
sources or conversations betweendoctors and patients, or when
you need to share your credit card number with your child.
I think the reality is all of our personal exchanges are at
risk from increasing threats posed by hackers, malware,
(33:19):
spyware companies and more. But it goes beyond that.
We believe in everyday privacy, not just privacy for the
hypersensitive conversations, because everyday privacy makes
you feel free to be yourself. You know, you wouldn't feel
comfortable being yourself if there was a camera in your
living room recording everythingyou did and said.
You wouldn't accept it in your physical life and you shouldn't
accept it in your digital life either.
(33:41):
Of course, end to end encryptionis the gold standard here.
But another nice example of everyday privacy on WhatsApp is
disappearing messages. You know, it's a relief to know
you can say what you want now and not have it hanging around
forever and ever into the future.
And as we launch that, it's growing hugely and now lots of
people have it turned on by default for all of their
conversations. Yeah, I do know that
specifically for younger kids, like teenagers, I think they
(34:03):
like to do that. So my traditional closing
question then, what does grade look like for what's that in the
next few years on the product and privacy?
I think it looks like continuingto be the best, most private way
that people can communicate and continuing to keep the apps
simple, reliable and private formore than 2 billion people.
(34:25):
And there's Many thanks for coming on the show.
I am talking about app that I think I've probably used at
least 10% of my day on a mobile phone.
So in closing, any recommendations which have
inspired you recently? I was trying to think if I
could, you know, how many like pithy ancestors, like business
books or something. But honestly, I'm the mother to
(34:45):
a two and four year old, so I read a lot of children's books
and I think that older ones are all of the best ones.
Like Doctor Seuss. You know, there are some great
life lessons in there. I don't know if you know all the
places you'll go, but the way ittalks about handling adversity
in life, so I think that's brilliant.
Believe it or not, I think children's books from the UK are
actually better than most. Part of the world.
(35:07):
Yeah, like Jeffrey Orlas and I think the other the, the forgot
the other lady who actually writes very good books on that.
That's great. So how can my audience find you?
Well, I'm on LinkedIn as Alice Newton Rex, or if you're
interested in getting more news about everything exciting coming
up on WhatsApp and all of the features my team and I are
working on, you can follow the official WhatsApp channel as
(35:29):
well as the at WhatsApp handle and at WhatsApp business handles
on Instagram X or Facebook. And you can definitely find a
podcast anywhere from YouTube toSpotify.
And of course, drop us the feedback on any channel that you
want to. So, Alice, man, thanks for
coming on the show and thank youfor sharing, sharing a lot of
(35:52):
what you're building there todaywith us.
Yeah. Thank you too.
Thanks.
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