How does a WhatsApp chatbot work?
A customer's message reaches the bot as a webhook from the WhatsApp Business API; the bot decides a reply — by matching a flow you drew, or by an AI reading the message — and sends it back through the API inside the customer's 24-hour window.
A customer's message reaches the bot as a webhook from the WhatsApp Business API; the bot decides a reply — by matching a flow you drew, or by an AI reading the message — and sends it back through the API inside the customer's 24-hour window.
A customer's message reaches the bot as a webhook from the WhatsApp Business API. The bot decides a reply: a rule-based bot matches the message to a flow you drew — buttons, menus, branches — while an AI assistant reads the message, looks things up in your catalogue and knowledge, and writes an answer. The reply goes back through the API inside the customer's 24-hour window, so no template is needed.
What separates the two is what happens to a message the flow did not predict. A rule-based bot falls back to a menu; an assistant answers it, asks for what is missing, or hands over to a person when a rule says so.
AI sales agent vs chatbot has the comparison; rules an AI cannot break is how the handover is enforced.
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