Business
WhatsApp Unveils AI Voice Calls and Smart Shopping Tools to Empower Business Interactions
At the Conversations 2025 event held in Miami, Meta introduced a transformative update to its WhatsApp Business Platform, aimed at revolutionising how companies connect with their customers. These new features include AI-powered shopping tools, voice and video calls, and a smarter, centralised marketing system, making WhatsApp more than just a messaging service for businesses.
Until now, WhatsApp’s role in customer service primarily involved chat-based interactions. But this is changing. Meta has announced that businesses will soon be able to make and receive voice and video calls directly on WhatsApp, marking a significant upgrade. This feature is designed to handle more complex customer queries that are often difficult to resolve over text.
“Whether it’s answering complex questions or offering guidance that’s hard to type out — this new calling feature could make the overall support experience faster and more personal.”
This shift will help brands offer a more human, efficient, and engaging customer service experience. Of course, calls will only be made once customers have given their consent, ensuring privacy remains a top priority.
In addition to voice and video calls, voice messaging is also making its way to the platform. This opens up more flexibility, particularly in sectors like healthcare, education, and finance, where verbal communication is often more effective.
Meta is also exploring the future of AI voice assistants. It hinted at voice-based AI assistance possibly arriving soon, allowing customers to interact with an AI agent in real time to solve problems — just by talking.
On the marketing front, WhatsApp Business is receiving a major productivity boost. Meta is integrating its popular Ads Manager interface into WhatsApp, allowing businesses to manage advertising campaigns not just on WhatsApp, but also across Facebook and Instagram — all in one place. This includes ad tracking, budget management, and promotional planning.
With the help of Meta’s Advantage+ AI, businesses can also automate their campaigns for maximum efficiency. It optimises spending and ad placements, even placing content in WhatsApp Status updates. For companies with repeat customers or seasonal offers, this means faster, smarter marketing with minimal effort.
Perhaps the most forward-looking addition is the new Business AI shopping feature, currently being tested in Mexico. This tool helps customers browse, get personalised product recommendations, make purchases, and even receive post-sale support — all without leaving the chat. Meta plans to roll this out globally in the near future.
These features are particularly promising for small and mid-sized businesses, offering a cost-effective solution to reach more people, streamline customer service, and boost sales — all within a single app.
With these upgrades, Meta is positioning WhatsApp Business as a one-stop platform for communication, shopping, and marketing — simplifying life for both companies and customers alike.
Business
Capgemini to buy WNS to boost its business process services with AI – Computerworld
For Gartner vice president analyst DD Mishra, WNS’s investments in intelligent automation, analytics, and agentic solutions including its TRAC analytics suite and Malkom knowledge management platform will complement Capgemini’s existing technology and consulting strengths.
Sharath Srinivasamurthy, research vice president at IDC, pointed to the acquisitions WNS has itself made in recent months, including Kipi.ai, Smart Cube, and OptiBuy to enhance its data, analytics, and procurement stack and extend its proficiency in business process operations, said.
However, Rajesh Ranjan, managing partner at Everest Group, views the WNS acquisition as more of a strategic play rather than being focused on garnering more agentic tools or capabilities.
Business
Locafy Launches AI-Powered SEO Suite Targeting 40M Business Market

Locafy’s AI Search Platform Powers Visibility Across Organic and AI Search
New Product Lineup Tailored to Local, National, and e-Commerce Businesses
AI-Powered Tools Designed to Automate Engagement and Accelerate Online Presence
PERTH, Australia, July 07, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Locafy Limited (NASDAQ: LCFY, “Locafy”), a globally recognized leader in location-based digital marketing, today unveiled its FY26 suite of AI-powered SEO products. These solutions, now commercially available following successful market testing, are designed to deliver measurable improvements across organic, AI, and marketplace search results.
Locafy initially outlined its AI-powered publishing roadmap in December 2024, promising to streamline content production and improve cost-effective online visibility for businesses.
“We are excited to announce that we’ve delivered on that promise,” said Gavin Burnett, CEO of Locafy.
All of Locafy’s publishing and SEO products are designed to drive visibility in search engines and, increasingly, AI-driven search tools and marketplaces. Recent research shows these optimizations extend across both traditional and emerging search platforms.
“We’ve evolved our technology to influence not only search engine rankings but also AI search results,” said Burnett. “Our platform helps position our clients’ websites as authoritative sources for high-value keywords, across local, national, and e-commerce campaigns.”
Burnett added, “We’ve also automated the creation of AI-search-ready landing pages, opening up a greenfield opportunity for scaled monetization. Our U.S. directory includes more than 9.68 million direct business listings, and our citation management partners publish more than 28 million business listings across our directories. Each of these represents either a direct sales opportunity or a chance to collaborate with partners using the data we already publish on their behalf.”
Locafy is focused on three primary solution categories:
- Online Business Listings
- Local SEO
- AI-powered engagement tools
Online Business Listings
Locafy continues to assert that online business listings form the cornerstone of successful Local SEO. These listings supply structured data that fuels automated SEO product generation. Locafy currently publishes more than 9.5 million listings in the U.S. and remains focused on partnerships with citation management firms and multi-location businesses. It is also exploring acquisitions of databases, directories, and citation management assets.
The Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the Local SEO solution in their key target markets of USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK is more than 40 million businesses.
“We currently host more than 63 million business listings worldwide, of which more than 40 million are in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the UK,” said Burnett. “However, our direct sales opportunity is more than 11.4 million, plus we have more than 28 million listings that we publish on behalf of partners, who can now connect to our Platform to automate the production of our Local SEO products for their clients.”
Country | Partner Added* | Claimed* |
Australia | 2,145,707 | 652,351 |
Canada | 1,533,479 | 289,274 |
United Kingdom | 3,458,205 | 802,003 |
United States of America | 33,076,154 | 9,684,329 |
TOTAL | 40,213,545 | 11,427,957 |
Local SEO
The flagship solution, Localizer, integrates listing syndication, AI-search optimization, review management, and Google Map Pack enhancement.
“We haven’t seen another product that combines these capabilities—at a price point starting around
AI-powered Engagement Tools
In addition to improving search visibility, Locafy has developed a scalable, cost-effective AI Voice Concierge that can serve as a virtual receptionist, product expert, or customer service agent.
“This is our first step into AI-enabled customer engagement,” said Burnett. “Our Voice Concierge acts like a digital team member—it can take bookings, provide answers, and interact 24/7. Just feed it your business documents and it learns. We record and transcribe every interaction, giving clients full transparency.
“This kind of capability once felt like science fiction, but it’s here now—and Locafy is helping businesses adapt and thrive in an AI-powered world.”
Over the past six months, Locafy has streamlined its product suite, automated key production processes, and validated product performance through live testing. With this foundation in place, the Company is poised for commercial growth in FY2026.
While the company still offers solutions for National SEO and e-Commerce, it believes the immediate opportunity afforded by its breakthroughs in AI Search represents a larger and more scalable revenue opportunity with far greater automation already in place.
About Locafy
Locafy (Nasdaq: LCFY, LCFYW) is a globally recognized software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company specializing in local search engine marketing. Founded in 2009, Locafy’s mission is to revolutionize the US
Investor Relations Contact:
Matt Glover
Gateway Group, Inc.
(949) 574-3860
LCFY@gateway-grp.com
Business
Apple appeals against ‘unprecedented’ €500m EU fine over app store | Apple
Apple has launched an appeal against an “unprecedented” €500m (£430m) fine imposed by the EU on the company, in the latest clash between US tech companies and Brussels.
The iPhone maker accused the European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – of going “far beyond what the law requires” in a dispute over its app store.
In April, the commission fined Apple €500m after finding the company had breached the Digital Markets Act by preventing app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the app store.
Last month, Apple overhauled its app store rules to comply with the EU order to scrap its technical and commercial curbs on developers in order to avoid fines of 5% of its average daily worldwide revenue, or about €50m a day.
As a result Apple introduced new fee structures for developers using its app store. On Monday, Apple accused Brussels of making it deploy “confusing” business terms in order to avoid the threat of fines.
“Today we filed our appeal because we believe the European Commission’s decision – and their unprecedented fine – go far beyond what the law requires,” said Apple, announcing an appeal to the general court, the second highest court in the EU. “As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business terms which are confusing for developers and bad for users.”
Apple also accused the commission of unlawfully expanding the definition of “steering” – or the language and methods the company allows developers to use when guiding consumers outside its app stores.
The company said officials on Brussels had changed the definition by, for instance, not just focusing on whether app developers should be allowed to link to an external website, but also on whether developers should be permitted to promote offers inside an app.
Donald Trump’s senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has accused the EU of using “lawfare” against big US tech companies, describing the use of regulations against American companies such as Apple and Meta as part of a barrage of “non-tariff weapons” used for by foreign states against the US.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, said in April that the EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to agree a trade deal with the US. In January, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the Facebook owner Meta, accused the EU of “institutionalising censorship” via its digital rules.
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Trump has set a 9 July deadline to seal a trade deal with the bloc – with the threat of imposing a 50% tariff on EU imports into the US if agreement is not reached.
Tom Smith, a competition lawyer at Geradin Partners and a former legal director at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, said Apple “fundamentally hates” attempts to change its app store.
“The blunt truth is that it is worth spending a few million on legal fees in order to disrupt and delay the development of a more open app ecosystem, which is a market that is worth many billions a year to Apple,” he said.
The European Commission has been approached for comment.
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