Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced Wednesday that users of the chat app with personal accounts can now convert them to business accounts. This gives users the ability to list information such as location and opening hours, which can be useful for small cafes and shop owners.
Some of the other features of business accounts involve organizing chats with colored labels, using automatic greetings or away messages, and shortcuts for quick responses. On his channel, Durov said Telegram plans to launch more commerce features this month, including a way to integrate AI-powered chatbots for customer service.
“Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can take customer service automation to a whole new level,” he stated.
Telegram tries to compete with WhatsApp Business, which crossed the mark of 200 million monthly active users last year, with these new features. Meta-owned WhatsApp introduced many business-oriented features last year, including personalized messages for clients and flows to complete eCommerce transactions without leaving the app.
Over the past two years, Telegram has focused on growing its business through premium subscriptions, self-custodial crypto walletand auction of premium usernames. The chat app, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, also plans to launch its advertising platform this month with a revenue sharing program for the channels.