Meta Singapore chief eyes chat apps as next sales frontier

[SINGAPORE] Artificial intelligence (AI) bots that pitch, prattle and sell you stuff in your WhatsApp and Messenger chats are set to helm the future storefronts of Singapore firms, and the tech giant behind them wants to help businesses get there.

Nicole Tan, the new Meta country director for Singapore, sees her job as getting more local organisations onto new AI-powered advertising tools from Meta, and do measurably better business.

Tan, who spent nine years as Meta’s country director for Malaysia before moving to Singapore, is focusing on getting executives here to adopt both AI format ads and Meta’s AI tools that automate and optimise ad campaigns in real time.

“We look at things like dynamic ads and reel video ads. So these are products that use machine learning to help understand what has been doing very well,” she said in an interview with The Straits Times six months into her new role.

Like Google, Meta’s suite of AI tools uses machine learning to help businesses turn simple inputs such as goals, budgets, target audiences and product visuals into online ad campaigns.

But rather than search advertising, Meta dominates social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and leverages social interactions and predictive signals for customer engagement. Clients include Shopee and Nespresso.

Tan added that among Meta’s Asia-Pacific (APAC) customers, businesses that use its AI tools see a 20 per cent increase in returns on ad spend versus when they did not.

High on her focus list is business messaging, which lets companies communicate directly with customers on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram through a unified inbox.

“Especially in Singapore, people love using business messaging,” she said. I order my cake on WhatsApp, or I order something on Messenger. It’s a simple way to discover a product and then go straight to being able to talk to somebody on text, and being able to buy that (product).”

Users and businesses interact more than 600 million times per day via Meta’s business messaging, according to the California-based company, which reported about 3.5 billion users a day across its family of apps in 2025.

Tan, who spent over a decade in the advertising business before joining Meta, noted that companies in Singapore are more advanced in technology and global expansion, compared with Malaysia.

“There’s a very strong growth mindset in Singapore, where people are interested to test and learn,” she said.

In 2024, the Singapore Government singled out Meta for not doing enough to counter scams on its platforms, and in 2025, threatened it with fines up to $1 million under the Online Criminal Harms Act if it did not curb impersonation scams on Facebook.

Tan said the company is working on building scam reporting tools for users, and partnering stakeholders to improve its policies, detection and enforcement.

“Nobody wants that on our platform, least of all us,” she said.

In late 2022, Meta cut more than 11,000 employees, or about 13 per cent of its workforce, in the first mass layoff in the company’s history. Some workers in its Singapore office lost jobs.

Asked about that and current staff morale, Ms Tan said: “In terms of the layoffs, I have nothing more to share. Specifically for the Singapore cohort, we are the APAC headquarters, and that continues to be really important for us.” THE STRAITS TIMES