A 'startup' uses WhatsApp to bring Latin Americans closer to artificial intelligence

A worker at a hotel in Bogotá uses his cell phone. Jeff Greenberg (Getty Images)

Latin America is one of the regions with the lowest adoption rates of artificial intelligence (AI) in the world.

Now, a Colombian company wants to bring Latin Americans closer to technology through one of their favorite applications: WhatsApp.

The Truora company launched on April 17 a bot through which WhatsApp users can interact with ChatGPT, a text generation model that uses artificial intelligence to answer questions.

In just nine days it registered 35,000 users and they keep adding.

In a study published in May of last year, the global company IBM reported that Latin American companies are tied with US companies as the least exploring AI, with only 43% of respondents reporting their interest.

This low adoption is not offset by the percentage of companies that are already deploying AI as part of their operations or consumer service offerings, which are also among the lowest in the world.

In China, where attitudes towards AI are more positive, 58% of companies have already deployed AI and 30% report exploring the technology.

Truora is a technology company that, among its services, offers companies products so that their consumers can interact through WhatsApp, explains CEO Daniel Bilbao.

“We have a hypothesis and it is that the way to quickly adopt technology in Latin America is WhatsApp.

That is why most companies, when they want to improve their business or marketing or customer service processes, do everything through WhatsApp”, says Bilbao.

And it is that Latin Americans live on WhatsApp, an application owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

It is not only the place where they send messages to their acquaintances, it is also where they make purchases, store photos, documents and data, and have direct communication with companies.

According to a 2021 report by the consultancy App Annie, WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging app in most Latin American countries, with an adoption rate close to 90% in some countries.

In discussing ChatGPT with other professionals in the region, Bilbao and his colleagues realized there was an appetite for using it, but a lack of clear direction on how to do it.

“My mother, who is 70-something years old, had me dry saying: 'My son, my son, sign me up. How is that for the

?'

So we said: We are already experts in WhatsApp, we already have a technology that connects this with companies, let's also show Latin Americans the power of artificial intelligence through WhatsApp, so we remove the barriers and more people will understand what it is," he says. Bilbao.

The bot was created an image of a genie coming out of a lamp, as if it were granting wishes but, instead of wishes, it answers every question.

They called him The Genius and to get in touch with him you only need one

.

Although it also works in English, the launch is focused on the Spanish-speaking population.

The vast majority of users, to date, are Latin American, but 18% are in Spain, according to Bilbao.

In a study published at the end of 2020, the University of Oxford stated that there are stark differences in public attitudes towards AI-powered automated decision-making between world regions.

Concerns that AI is harmful are highest in North America (47%) and Latin America (49%).

By comparison, in Southeast Asia only 25% are concerned that AI is harmful;

in East Asia the result was 11%.

Expectations of how AI will change the world also differ.

A study by the World Economic Forum (WEF) published last year showed that particularly large percentages of Latin Americans expect artificial intelligence to bring about changes in education, security and employment, while the Chinese are the most likely to expect AI to change shopping, transportation, entertainment, and their home.

"What are the greatest dangers of Artificial Intelligence?" this newspaper asked the bot El Genio, via WhatsApp.

His response listed five risks.

The last of them reads: “Some AI experts have raised the possibility that AI could eventually surpass human intelligence and pose an existential threat to humanity.”

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