内容来源：https://www.livemint.com/ai/india-ai-adoption-through-whatsapp-11758449278183.html

内容总结：

在印度，人工智能正通过一款国民级应用悄然进入普通人的生活——不是ChatGPT，而是家喻户晓的WhatsApp。从清晨问候到公共服务，这个拥有十亿用户的超级平台正在成为印度民众接触AI的第一扇窗口，却也引发了关于数字主权的深刻思考。

在博帕尔，52岁的服装店老板拉梅什·亚达夫通过扫描报纸上的二维码，直接在WhatsApp上用方言语音支付了电费；一位北印地语地区的年轻妈妈通过Puch.ai的聊天机器人获取孕期的饮食建议；还有公务员考生查询时事资讯，学校管理员制作活动海报，日结工人更新社保档案——所有这些场景都通过WhatsApp上的AI机器人实现，无需下载新应用，也无需突破语言壁垒。

这场静默革命的背后，是印度独特的数字生态：全国近9亿互联网用户中，多数人仅通过少数几个应用接触网络，其中WhatsApp、YouTube和Facebook占据绝对主导。Meta印度副总裁桑迪亚·德瓦纳坦指出："当AI存在于你每天使用的应用中时，无需下载、订阅或学习新东西。"

这种便利性使得政府和企业纷纷将WhatsApp作为数字化服务的首选渠道。安得拉邦91%的考场准考证通过WhatsApp发放，中央邦电力公司通过聊天机器人处理账单查询，疫情期间政府更依托该平台维持公共服务运转。初创企业如Puch.ai、Haptik和Gupshup也借助WhatsApp触达数百万用户，将AI服务嵌入民众最熟悉的聊天界面。

然而，这种高度依赖也埋下了隐忧。当电费缴纳、福利申请、考试服务等关键民生服务都锚定在一家美国科技公司控制的平台上，政策变化或接口调整可能直接影响数亿人的生活。互联网自由基金会创始人阿帕·古普塔警告："公共服务设计必须坚持平台中立，WhatsApp应作为渠道之一，而非唯一渠道。"

目前，印度正面临两难选择：一方面，WhatsApp提供的低门槛接入极大加速了AI普及，让非英语人群和乡村居民也能享受技术红利；另一方面，这种依赖可能削弱本土数字主权，使国家关键服务受制于境外商业实体的决策。正如智库"互联网与社会中心"执行主任坦维尔·哈桑所言："主权问题不在于是否自建技术，而在于如何确保具有公共基础设施属性的技术真正为人民利益服务。"

在这场由聊天窗口驱动的AI革命中，印度正在效率与自主、便利与安全之间寻找平衡点。当技术以最无缝的方式融入日常生活，如何守护数字时代的主权边界，已成为这个人口大国必须面对的时代课题。

中文翻译：

从“早安”问候到人工智能：WhatsApp如何成为十亿印度人的科技入口
在印度，人工智能正通过WhatsApp悄然融入日常生活——这个原本用于家庭聊天和早安问候的应用程序，正在开启一场静默的革命。但这场革命背后隐藏着什么代价？

班加罗尔讯：清晨时分，52岁的服装店老板拉梅什·亚达夫在博帕尔展开当地印地语报纸，看到中央邦电力分销公司发布的一则特别通告。公告上的二维码和电话号码展示着缴纳电费的新方式——通过WhatsApp支付。早已习惯UPI支付的亚达夫扫描二维码后，WhatsApp自动弹出选项菜单，几分钟内就完成了缴费。如今他甚至无需操作菜单，只需按住绿色麦克风图标用本德尔语说“我要交电费”，由Gupshup对话式AI平台驱动的聊天机器人便会回复支付链接。

在另一个印地语小镇，一位年轻孕妇正向WhatsApp机器人咨询孕期饮食建议。印度高端号码9090909090上的Puch.ai助手用印地英语混合语发送语音回复，提供简单的饮食建议。对她和Puch平台60%的用户而言，这是人工智能首次融入日常生活。还有准备公务员考试的考生通过Puch获取时事资讯，学校管理人员索取活动定制海报。

对于非正规行业的劳动者，人工智能也通过福利服务渗透进他们的生活。一名日薪工人通过WhatsApp上的微软Jugalbandi机器人，用方言输入信息即可实时更新全国非组织化工人数据库中的个人信息。这些分散的应用场景——母亲查询饮食、农民寻找肥料、工人申领福利——正被同一个宏大叙事串联：WhatsApp试图成为印度接触人工智能的主门户。

十亿用户挑战
印度近9亿互联网用户中，绝大多数通过智能手机上网。这些用户多居住于非都市区，网络世界对他们而言并非应用商店，而是WhatsApp、YouTube等少数熟悉平台。数据显示，方言内容消费日益增长，语音媒介使用率持续上升。这意味着印度大众接触AI的方式不会通过Perplexity或ChatGPT实现——对于都市精英群体，AI可能是效率工具甚至心理顾问；但对小镇居民和农村人口而言，网络即等同于WhatsApp，AI将通过语音对话和方言机器人等直观形式融入生活。

Meta印度及东南亚副总裁桑迪亚·德瓦纳坦正主导这场变革。拥有银行业背景的她将审慎态度与科技行业的敏捷性相结合，推动WhatsApp成为印度AI普及的桥梁。"当AI融入日常使用的应用时，用户无需下载学习即可直接使用"，她强调本土化构建的重要性，"印度用户会以自己习惯的方式与AI对话"。

这种转变不仅体现在日常场景，也深入公共服务领域。"安得拉邦91%的考场准考证通过WhatsApp发放"，德瓦纳坦举例说，"从单城市试点扩展到每月数百万张票据处理，叠加AI能力的WhatsApp正在创造实际价值"。去年她带领团队前往瓦拉纳西乡村，亲眼目睹母亲通过MetaAI辅导孩子数学作业，"印度的AI未来不仅由代码书写，更蕴藏在这些日常需求瞬间"。

先行者布局
虽然科技巨头仍在探索首次用户的使用偏好，但企业和政府已成为 conscious 推动力量。企业借助WhatsApp建立直达消费者的通道，政府服务则利用其规模优势。这些先行者正在教育用户将WhatsApp视为服务平台而非单纯聊天工具。

对话式AI平台Haptik首席执行官阿沙德·朱萨瓦拉指出："WhatsApp的转化效果天差地别，用户免去下载登录环节，参与度可提升5-7倍"。其客户涵盖D2C零售、医疗保健等领域的中小企业，这些企业希望将客户咨询转化为预约、支付和商机筛选。下一步进化方向是从问答机器人升级为能完成订票、交易、投诉处理全流程的"自主代理"。

政府服务同样积极拥抱该平台以突破识字率和接入障碍。Gupshup公司的CitizenLink系统支持中央邦电费支付、投诉热线和选举宣传等活动。疫情期间当呼叫中心关闭时，配电公司转向WhatsApp聊天机器人维持计费和投诉处理，该经验已扩展至UPI支付、票务预订和福利申请领域。

Gupshup创始人贝鲁德·塞斯称之为数字秩序的重构："我们让政府服务适配民众熟悉的渠道，而非相反。借助语音AI，偏远村民可用方言即时获取服务"。未来两三年，这些接口将从数字助手演进为能预判需求的"公民伴侣"。

对Puch.ai等初创企业而言，WhatsApp已成为普通人首次接触AI的桥梁。其首席执行官西达尔特·巴蒂亚表示选择WhatsApp具有战略意义："对于二三线城镇的年轻群体，下载ChatGPT门槛过高，而打开WhatsApp却是本能操作"。AI通过他们早已熟悉的聊天窗口渗透生活，使查成绩、获取健康建议或查询车次等需求可在家庭聊天界面同步完成，这种设计使WhatsApp成为习惯养成的桥梁——从聊天线程里的好奇尝试逐渐发展为每日使用的AI伙伴。

"要让民众受益于AI，首先需要激发尝试兴趣"，巴蒂亚强调。这些实践展示了企业、政府与初创公司在AI普及道路上的融合，也揭示了WhatsApp成为技术与日常生活最实用桥梁的原因。

隐患在于，这座桥梁也可能成为瓶颈。随着从账单支付到福利申领等服务纷纷迁移至WhatsApp，印度正在将关键民生交互锚定在不受控制的平台上。这种依赖蕴藏风险——门洛帕克（Meta总部）的政策调整可能影响中央邦的电费缴纳或安得拉邦的考场安排。鉴于科技平台处于地缘政治 tensions 中心，政策与技术领域都在思索：谁最终决定AI如何交付给数亿印度人？

主权之问
Puch.ai的巴蒂亚承认WhatsApp兼具助推器与枷锁双重属性："选择WhatsApp是因为国家经不起等待完美接口建设的时间成本，它确实是引导印度适应AI的良好过渡桥梁"。该公司虽已构建可独立运行的后端系统，但现实是所有WhatsApp优先的初创企业都依赖Meta的商业API接口——其经济模式已历经多次调整。

这种依赖性与普惠性形成微妙平衡。Haptik的朱萨瓦拉指出："依赖性是合理担忧，但被WhatsApp在印度的普及度所抵消——对多数中小企业而言，它不是可选项，而是唯一选项"。他同时承认未来不会由WhatsApp独占市场，企业已在探索兼容Google RCS、Instagram等聊天界面的互操作性方案。

Meta则倾向于将WhatsApp定位为赋能者而非垄断通道。"我们的角色是提供易于使用的分发渠道，不同平台应是互补而非竞争关系"，德瓦纳坦表示。但公共服务部署规模暴露出依赖风险升级的可能性。互联网自由基金会创始人阿帕·古普塔律师警告："政府必须确保WhatsApp是可选渠道而非唯一渠道。当公共服务仅存于WhatsApp时，意味着政府放弃了对访问权限、政策调整、定价及产品迭代的控制权"。他强调服务设计应坚持"平台中立"原则，通过合同保障可移植性与可审计性。

若WhatsApp成为亿万印度人接触AI的主要入口，其与印度主权AI战略的关系亦需审视。互联网与社会中心执行主任坦维尔·哈桑认为："国家承担着诸多重要职责，实难匹配科技巨头的研发速度。主权问题不在于是否构建新技术，而在于确保具有公共基础设施属性的技术能为民众利益服务——而非仅便利商业运营或服务商盈利"。

这些观点共同勾勒出WhatsAppAI时刻的核心悖论：对用户是最易用入口，对初创企业是最快扩张路径，对政府是阻力最小的数字化道路。但当三方共同汇聚于单一应用时，印度需要权衡：今日的便利是否值得明日的依赖？

核心要点：

• 印度非都市区用户接触AI的最便捷通道将是WhatsApp
• 该应用早已成为消息、照片和视频的交换平台
• 凭借无处不在的市场渗透力，WhatsApp正自诩为印度通往AI世界的门户
• 随着从账单支付到福利计划等服务依赖WhatsApp，专家警告印度正将关键民生交互锚定在不受控平台
• 所有WhatsApp优先的初创企业都依赖Meta商业API，其经济模式多次变动
• 此类变化将直接影响企业利润空间

英文来源：

From ‘good morning’ to AI: How WhatsApp is becoming the gateway to a billion Indians
Forget apps like ChatGPT. In India, AI is entering people’s lives through WhatsApp—the very app they use for family chats and good morning messages. This quiet revolution promises unprecedented access. But what's the hidden cost?
Bengaluru: One morning in Bhopal, 52-year-old garment shop owner Ramesh Yadav unfolded a local Hindi newspaper to find a rather unusual notice from Madhya Pradesh Madhya Kshetra Vidyut Vitaran Company Ltd, a power distribution firm. The notice had a QR code and a number advertised as a new way to pay his electricity bill—through WhatsApp.
Yadav, already comfortable with UPI, scanned the code, which opened WhatsApp on his phone and presented him with a menu of options. Within minutes, he cleared his dues. Now with WhatsApp’s voice features, he doesn’t even bother with menus. He presses the green mic and says in Bundeli, “Bijli ka bill bharno hai." An AI bot powered by conversational-AI platform Gupshup replies with a payment link.
Elsewhere, a young mother in a Hindi-speaking town asks a WhatsApp bot what foods are safe during pregnancy. Puch.ai, a WhatsApp-first assistant now available on 9090909090 (one of India’s most expensive numbers as the company spent a fortune to get it), responds in Hinglish with simple diet suggestions as a voice note.
For her, as for 60% of Puch’s users, this is the very first time AI feels like part of daily life.
On another day, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) aspirant asks Puch for current affairs updates, while a school admin asks for a customized poster for an event.
Similarly for India’s unorganized workers, AI is creeping into their lives through welfare services. A daily-wage worker updating her e-Shram records, India’s national database of unorganized workers that links them to social security benefits. She can now type in her local language in Microsoft’s Jugalbandi bot on WhatsApp and within minutes, can update her details.
These cases may look fragmented at first. A mother here with a diet query, a farmer there finding the best fertilizers through chatbots or a worker elsewhere trying to find welfare schemes. But these strands are tied together by a single, larger narrative: WhatsApp wants to become India’s gateway to AI.
The billion-user challenge
Let’s look at this in reverse order. India has nearly 900 million internet users with a significant majority accessing the internet through their smartphones. Most of these users are outside metros and for them, the internet isn’t a marketplace of apps. It’s mostly a handful of familiar names, such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Reports show that nearly every user dips into content in her/his native language, and that voice as a medium is also rising steadily.
This means that India’s mass AI adoption is unlikely to be driven by downloads of Perplexity or ChatGPT. For India’s tier I and affluent, English speaking crowd, AI may be a productivity hack or even a therapist; but for the India that resides in non-metros with smaller ticket sizes, and rural India, where the internet is synonymous with WhatsApp or YouTube, AI is likely to enter through the most convenient and intuitive touch points of voice, chat, cues and bots that answer everyday questions in their vernacular.
For these users, the easier gateway would be a chat window they already know and use—the one where they exchange politically charged videos, send school notes, and forward endless “good morning" messages.
Acutely aware of the power of its ubiquitous presence in the market, WhatsApp is positioning itself as India’s AI front door. At the centre of this momentum is Sandhya Devanathan, vice president of Meta (WhatsApp’s parent) in India and Southeast Asia. Devanathan, who once navigated the highly cautious and risk-averse corridors of banking, is currently steering one of the fastest moving consumer technology transitions in India.
“If AI lives inside an app you already use every day, like WhatsApp, you don’t need to download, subscribe or learn something new," she says. “Your usage begins right there."
Devanathan’s instinct to make technology meet people where they already are is something she has carried across her career. She recalls her early years in the world of banking, where decision making could take months and products were shaped by regulators. At Meta, where she’s spent nearly a decade, she had to learn to follow the exact opposite in terms of speed, experimentation and products that touched consumers directly.
She’s now bringing those two instincts together: the caution of a banker and the urgency of a platform leader. It’s a balance that now defines her role at Meta’s WhatsApp. With India becoming a testbed for how a billion people might access AI and shape habits, Devanathan says WhatsApp has to feel fast and familiar enough to be useful, while also being reliable enough to handle the daily lives of hundreds of millions.
“India has done very, very well there," Devanathan says of Meta AI’s early adoption on WhatsApp. “What’s been fascinating is people in India don’t always use it the way we imagined from the US. They treat it like a chat, asking questions in their own way. That’s why it’s so important to build with local nuance."
The shift is visible not just in small and everyday interactions, but also in public services.
“In Andhra Pradesh, for example, 91% of exam hall tickets (admit cards students receive for board exams) were delivered on WhatsApp," she notes. “What started as a pilot for one metro has now scaled to millions of tickets a month across cities. These are the kinds of everyday conveniences where AI, layered on WhatsApp, can make a real difference."
To that end Devanathan stresses that WhatsApp’s AI ambitions can’t be built from glass towers. Last year, she took her team to a village outside Varanasi, where they watched a mother use Meta AI on WhatsApp to help her child with math homework, which she says was proof that India’s AI future will be written not in code alone, but in small, everyday moments of need.
The first movers
To be fair, anticipating how first-time users are likely to tap AI is still a code to be cracked even by large tech giants Meta and Google. And while end consumers stumbling onto AI inside WhatsApp through chatbots and conversations feels almost accidental, it is businesses, and to some extent, even governments, that are consciously accelerating this shift.
Businesses benefit from a direct link to consumers without having to do it via an app, whereas government services can largely benefit from the scale that WhatsApp offers. These first movers are teaching Indians to treat WhatsApp not just as a chat app, but as a service desk.
For companies, the appeal is multifold. Conversations on WhatsApp convert far better than interactions on websites or apps.
“The difference is night and day," says Ahshad Jussawala, CEO of conversational AI platform Haptik. “With standalone apps, there’s friction—downloads, logins, learning curves." Haptik’s AI assistants allow a user to do everything from booking a doctor’s appointment to tracking an online order, all within a chat.
Jussawala notes that engagement rates on WhatsApp can be five to seven times higher because users don’t have to download them or create logins.
Haptik’s fastest adoption is coming from small and medium-sized business (SMBs) in sectors such as D2C retail, healthcare, education, and logistics. These businesses already use WhatsApp for customer updates but now want those chats to also convert into bookings, payments and lead qualification.
Jussawala says the next step is moving from FAQ bots to “autonomous agents" that go beyond answering questions and can act to complete tasks such as booking tickets, completing transactions and resolving complaints end-to-end.
Government services are also among early adopters of the platform to bypass literacy and access barriers.
Gupshup’s CitizenLink powers everything from electricity bill payments in Madhya Pradesh to complaint redressal helplines and election outreach campaigns.
During the pandemic, when call centres shut down, distribution companies turned to WhatsApp chatbots to keep billing and grievance redressal running. That experience has now expanded into UPI payments, ticket bookings and welfare applications.
Gupshup founder and CEO Beerud Sheth calls this a reversal of the old digital order.
“Instead of expecting people to adapt to apps or websites, we bring the government to familiar channels," says Sheth. “With Voice AI, a citizen in a remote village who isn’t comfortable typing on a smartphone keyboard can simply speak in the local dialect and receive services instantly," he says.
This means citizens can check electricity bills, file complaints or even register for a welfare scheme by speaking to WhatsApp in their local language.
Over the next two-three years, Sheth believes these interfaces will evolve from digital assistants to “civic companions" that are proactive systems and can anticipate and address citizen needs before they are even voiced.
For startups such as Puch.ai, WhatsApp has become the gateway to people meeting AI for the very first time, answering IAS prep questions, giving pregnancy diet tips or sharing transport updates.
Puch.ai CEO Siddharth Bhatia says the choice of WhatsApp was strategic. For young Indians in tier II and III towns, downloading and experimenting with ChatGPT is unlikely, but opening a WhatsApp thread is second nature.
“AI reaches them in the same window where they already forward school notes and swap family memes," he explains. This means users can get exam updates, personalised health suggestions or train status checks in the same platform where they chat with family.
Bhatia argues that this makes WhatsApp a habit-forming bridge—what starts as curiosity in a chat thread can slowly build into a daily relationship with AI.
“To make people benefit from AI, you need to first make it exciting enough for people to try," he says.
These moves, which demonstrate the varied ways Indians are interacting with AI, show how businesses, governments and startups are converging. They also make clear why WhatsApp has become the most practical bridge between technology and everyday life.
The problem is that this bridge can also become a bottleneck. As more services from bill payments to exam tickets to welfare schemes shift onto WhatsApp, India is anchoring critical citizen interactions to a platform it doesn’t control.
This dependency carries risks as policy changes in Menlo Park (Meta’s headquarters) could ripple through Madhya Pradesh’s electricity bills or Andhra Pradesh’s exam halls. Given the geopolitical tension between the world’s superpowers, with tech platforms at the centre of it, the question ringing across policy and tech corridors is: who ultimately decides how AI is delivered to hundreds of millions of Indians?
The sovereignty question
Puch’s Bhatia admits that WhatsApp acts like both the rocket fuel and the restraint.
“We went forward with WhatsApp because, as a nation, we can’t afford to wait to build the perfect interface, and WhatsApp serves as a nice bridge to introduce and get India accustomed to AI," he says, adding that the company has built its backend to run independently if needed.
The ground reality, however, is very different. Every WhatsApp-first startup depends on Meta’s Business API, whose economics have already shifted several times.
Such changes can directly affect the margins of startups piggybacking on WhatsApp. Startups such as Puch, Haptik and Gupshup are gaining access to millions of users through WhatsApp, which is installed in almost every Indian smartphone. But this kind of reach also comes with the fine print of dependency.
“Dependency is a valid concern, but it’s balanced by the reach and ubiquity of WhatsApp in India," says Jussawala of Haptik, adding that for most small and medium businesses, WhatsApp is not just another channel—it is the only channel.
At the same time, he acknowledges that the future won’t be WhatsApp alone. He says that businesses are already exploring interoperability to include other chat surfaces, such as Google RCS, Instagram and UPI-linked interfaces.
In its defence, Meta prefers to portray WhatsApp not as a chokepoint but as an enabler. “Our role is to give them the distribution arm that makes it very easy to use. We don’t see a world in which one competes with the other. It’s very complementary," says Devanathan.
But public deployments also indicate how dependency risks can scale quickly.
While it means speed and ease for citizens as seen with Andhra Pradesh’s pilot with exam hall tickets being sent on WhatsApp or Microsoft’s Jugalbandi bot helping workers update their e-Shram records, for policymakers, it is also a question of total dependence on WhatsApp.
“Governments must design public services so that WhatsApp is one channel, not the only channel," warns Apar Gupta, lawyer, digital rights advocate, and founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a nonprofit that fights for privacy, free speech, net neutrality and accountability in technology policy in India.
“If citizen services exist ‘only on WhatsApp’, public services are ceding control over access, policy shifts, pricing, and product deprecations they do not govern," says Gupta. He adds that services must be designed to be “platform-neutral", backed by contractual guarantees of portability and auditability.
If WhatsApp is to become the doorway for AI access for millions of Indians, it also raises the question of how it would affect India’s sovereign AI efforts.
Tanveer Hasan, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society, is of the opinion that the balance can never be achieved practically. “The state has many other important responsibilities to deliver and cannot realistically match the pace of Big Tech’s R&D," he says. “The sovereignty question is not always in building new technology, it is in making sure that for technologies with a public infrastructure element, the benefits for people are also hardcoded—not just the ease of doing business or margins for the service provider," he adds.
These perspectives, when put together, outline the paradox at the heart of WhatsApp’s AI moment. For users it is the easiest way in; for startups it is the fastest way to scale, and for governments it is the path to digitization with the least friction. But as all three converge on this one app, India must decide whether accessibility today is worth the dependency it creates tomorrow.

• For users outside India’s urban centres, the easiest way to access AI would be through WhatsApp.
• The app is already used to exchange messages, photos and videos.
• Acutely aware of the power of its ubiquitous presence in the market, WhatsApp is positioning itself as India’s gateway to the world of AI.
• With services from bill payments to welfare schemes depending on WhatsApp, experts warn that India is anchoring critical citizen interactions to a platform it doesn’t control.
• Also, every WhatsApp-first startup depends on Meta’s Business API, whose economics have already shifted several times.
• Such changes can directly affect their margins.