A clinic back office at night: a brass lamp lights an open appointment book with a fresh ink stroke beside a glowing phone.

AI agents on WhatsApp

A WhatsApp agent that writes to your system, not just replies.

The agent answers in Arabic and English, books the slot, confirms the order or opens the case, and writes it to Salesforce, Mindcat Inbox or your ERP. When it is unsure, it hands the chat to a person with a summary. Most chatbots stop at the answer. The record is where the money is.

Name the job for the agent Work out your monthly cost

Works with the WhatsApp Business Platform. Your number, your Meta account.

One named job

Pick the job it does on day one.

One job, one system it writes to, one person it hands over to. A second job comes after the first one works on real customers.

01Answer the portal leadReplies to Bayut, Property Finder and website leads on the company number, asks budget, area and move-in date, and offers viewing slots.

02Book the appointmentClinics, workshops and showrooms. The slot goes on the calendar and the reminder goes out the day before.

03Confirm the cash-on-delivery orderBefore the driver leaves, the customer confirms the address and the time, or cancels. Unconfirmed orders are the ones that come back.

04Book the car serviceThe customer picks the slot, the advisor gets the job card, and the approval for extra work comes back in the chat.

05Tell the customer where the order isStatus from the ERP or the courier, in the customer’s language, without a call to the branch.

Conversation to record

What the customer sees, and what lands in your system.

On WhatsApp, a Riyadh clinic’s number · 8:15 pm

Patientالسلام عليكم، أبي موعد عند طبيب الجلدية هالأسبوع
Agentوعليكم السلام. عندنا الأربعاء الساعة ٤:٣٠ أو الخميس الساعة ١٠ صباحًا. أي موعد يناسبك؟
Patientالخميس
Agentتم الحجز يوم الخميس الساعة ١٠ صباحًا. نرسل لك تذكيرًا قبل الموعد بيوم.
تسجيلAppointment booked: Dermatology, Thursday 10:00, reminder set for Wednesday
تحويلQuestions about results or medication go to the front desk

Mindcat Clinic · Appointment

Dermatology, Thursday 10:00

Channel: WhatsApp, Arabic (Najdi)
Patient: Matched on mobile number or WhatsApp user ID
Reminder: Utility template, Wednesday
Handoff rule: Clinical questions go to a person
Hosted: In the Kingdom

Illustrative, with an Arabic draft pending native review. The agent books in the patient’s dialect, writes the appointment, and leaves anything clinical to a person. Clinic WhatsApp messages are set up per client today.

Three sizes

Answers, integrations, or actions.

Scope	What it does	Build time, first job	Build price, first job
Answers and handoff	Answers from your content, buttons, handoff to a person, the lead written to your CRM	About 1 week	From AED/SAR 25,000 (USD 6,807.35)
Agent with integrations	Grounded answers, reads and writes in one or two systems, a human inbox	3 to 4 weeks	From AED/SAR 75,000 (USD 20,422.06)
Agent that takes actions, plus follow-ups	Bookings, payments, CRM or ERP writes, follow-up messages, Arabic and English, reporting	5 to 6 weeks	From AED/SAR 120,000 (USD 32,675.29)

The build price is one job, one system it writes to and one person it hands over to, quoted in writing from your brief. Meta’s message fees and the model calls are extra, at cost. Extra work is AED/SAR 900 an hour.

Most of the calendar is Meta's business verification and access to your systems, not code. Add one to two weeks when the agent writes bookings or payments. These are our delivery estimates for one or two builders, not published benchmarks.

What it connects to

Your store, DMS, clinic system or ATS.

Some systems open with an API key. Others need the vendor’s sign-off first. Here is which is which.

Your system	How it opens	What we do
Online stores: Shopify, Salla, Zid	Open APIs and order webhooks	Connected in the build. The agent reads the order and writes the confirmation back.
Recruitment: Greenhouse, Workable, Zoho Recruit	Open APIs	Connected in the build: screening answers, the CV and the interview slot on the candidate. Bayt access is commercial, so we confirm it with Bayt first.
Property portals: Property Finder, Bayut	Lead delivery through the portal’s own CRM integrations, gated by your plan	We confirm your plan’s access in week 0. The lead lands in Salesforce or Mindcat Inbox, and the agent answers it from there.
Dealer systems: CDK, Keyloop Autoline	Interfaces gated by the DMS vendor and your dealer agreement	We request the interface in week 0. Until it lands, the booking goes to Salesforce or Mindcat Bookings first.
Clinic systems: Oracle Health, Medisys and others	HL7 or FHIR, where your installation exposes it	Confirmed with your vendor before scope. Nabidh and Malaffi are health exchanges, not booking systems. Mindcat Clinic can hold the bookings instead.
Salesforce	Any object	Through Agentforce or the API, inside your org’s permissions.

Open APIs are a build task. Gated ones are a paperwork task, so we start the request on the day the scope is signed. Checked against each vendor’s developer documentation on 10 October 2026.

Week by week

Four weeks, and what you owe each week.

01YouWeek 0: start Meta’s checksStart business verification the day the scope is signed, give us test access to the CRM or booking system, and share 100 to 200 real chats for the test set.On: Meta Business Manager
02MindcatWeek 1: buildThe message layer, the 24-hour window tracker, the handoff and the system writes, built from the written spec. Templates go to Meta this week so rejections show early.On: Spec and templates
03MindcatWeek 2: make it behaveThe test set runs daily: off-topic requests, attempts to trick it, switches between Arabic and English, angry customers. Gulf dialects and Arabic in Latin letters are in the set.On: Test harness
04Your teamWeek 3: pilotYour people use it on the live number with a small group of friendly customers. We read the transcripts every day and fix the same day.On: Live number
05BothWeek 4: go liveOutbound starts once templates are approved and opt-ins exist. New accounts can message 250 people a day outside open chats at first, so we ramp up.On: Reporting

For an agent with integrations. Meta’s verification usually takes a few days and can stretch to about three weeks; inbound chats work while it runs, so the build does not wait. Template review can take up to 24 hours a round.

What usually slips

Four things that move the date.

How it is built

The same five planes as every agent we run.

Sending and receiving WhatsApp messages is the easy part. The work is in the agent, the rules around it and the writes it makes.

Plane	In a WhatsApp agent
Experience	Your company number, quick-reply buttons and forms, and the inbox your people already use: Mindcat Inbox, the Agentforce Service console, Mindcat Desk or Slack.
Control	One front door for every model and tool call: the consent check, the message-type check, the send-hour rule, the stop switch and the audit log.
Runtime	Agentforce when the work and permissions live in Salesforce, a custom agent otherwise. A model chosen for each step.
Memory	The contact, their consent by message type, whether the 24-hour window is open, and a summary of what was decided.
Durable	The queue, retries, protection against double bookings, template status, and the 24-hour pause after Meta blocks a marketing send.

Meta Business Agent, honestly

When Meta’s own agent is enough.

01It is enough whenThe job is answers from your catalog and FAQ, or a simple action on an API you already run, and you are not in health, finance or government.

02What it costs$2 per million tokens on WhatsApp, which Meta puts at about 4 to 5 US cents a message, delivery included. There is no free tier on WhatsApp, and Meta’s own example puts a simple four-message inquiry at about 16 to 20 cents.

03It is not enough whenYou run clinics or a finance business, which Meta excludes, or the job writes to several systems, follows your rules, needs an audit trail or keeps data in the UAE or the Kingdom.

Arabic

Tested on the Arabic your customers actually write.

Gulf customers write in Modern Standard Arabic, in Najdi, Hijazi and Emirati dialects, in Arabic written with Latin letters and numbers, and in a mix of Arabic and English in one line. Many send voice notes.

Stop it in one move

Every agent ships with a stop switch.

One switch hands every chat to people, and the number keeps working. We test it before go-live, the same way we test the answers.

The honest no

Four cases where we say no or start elsewhere.

The brief · one email

Name the job, the number and the system.

The honest no: if the work is a software factory with a named delivery date, we are the wrong partner.