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Zafir Khan

Zafir Khan

Head of Consumer Product at WhatsApp (Meta), based in Houston, Texas.

Sep 25, 2026

24:04
How do you incorporate AI into a product that people have already, you know, billions of people love and they've already learned to use it? And how do you incorporate that into a consumer experience and keep that consumer delighted?
24:19
Yeah, I think that presents a unique challenge because the reason people open WhatsApp, you know, billions of users a day is to just send a message to their mom and they're very used to the way it works.
24:30
And small changes in the user experience can lead to a lot of disruption.
24:35
And like, you know, WhatsApp is one of the only apps that, you know, my mom knows how to use and uses every day.
24:41
And so you have to be really mindful if we add new words.
24:44
workflows or new features in the app that they don't displace existing actions that users are trying to do.
24:51
And we've run into this with AI, right? In the early days of adding some AI features to WhatsApp, we did it, you know, somewhat naively of putting an AI button in places that users might not expect.

10 MINS LATER

34:38
But I think there's a lot more openness to it than we think, even from people we might perceive that, OK, you know, maybe they're old school and we can't make through.

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