20 years of
business messaging

The early messaging boom

As use cases expanded beyond basic notifications into transactional messaging, authentication, and service alerts, our platform data started to grow strongly and we saw the first signs of the trends that dominate B2C messaging today.

The pandemic-driven acceleration

Between 2020 and 2022, messaging increased exponentially, with annual interactions more than doubling on digital channels, including WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Messages for Business, social media interactions, and AI-enabled conversations.

COVID-era digital transformation forced immediate adoption across industries that had previously relied on in-person or phone-based communication. Our healthcare customers shifted from paper reminders and manual calls to digital appointment notifications and test result updates. Remote work and eCommerce created massive increases in authentication requests, delivery alerts, and customer support interactions. Evolution that might have taken a decade under normal circumstances, happened in just months.

Total Infobip interactions

SMS shows resilience and long-term growth

Ten years ago, SMS represented 99% of our platform traffic. Today, while it remains a key pillar channel for almost all of our customers, and message volumes continue to grow, SMS now accounts for 62% of the traffic on our platform.

Rather than signaling a decline in SMS as a B2C channel we are seeing it used alongside digital channels like WhatsApp, Viber and Messenger, and other messaging channels like RCS.

Global messaging interactions

The primary use cases for SMS reflect the channel’s strengths of reach, reliability, and trust. It is the chosen channel when brands need to deliver high‑priority information quickly and clearly; one‑time passcodes, urgent service alerts, delivery updates, and time‑sensitive updates.

When implemented as part of an omnichannel strategy alongside email, RCS, and digital channels – all augmented by AI, SMS will continue to play a key role for the foreseeable future.

Email refuses to fade – and scales instead

In the past decade email has experienced a transformation from under-measured technology to a highly effective, API-driven interaction channel. While email has been common in regulated industries, long-form communication, and B2B contexts for decades, its growth accelerated sharply after 2020 when it became fully API-driven, automated, and measurable.

We have seen the steepest acceleration between 2023 and 2025, when interactions increased nearly 5x as businesses integrated email into automated customer journeys, lifecycle messaging, and AI-driven personalization.

Financial services, insurance, and healthcare companies rely on email for compliance-driven messaging, detailed correspondence, and formal customer communication that requires permanence and structure – use cases where auditability, and content depth matter most.

Email growth

After WhatsApp Business launched in August 2018, we were quick to help our customers adopt the channel. Global volumes grew a staggering 8x from 2019 to 2020, then 2.7x between 2020 and 2021 as eCommerce use cases expanded during the pandemic, and businesses in regions where WhatsApp is popular used the app to facilitate more conversational interactions with customers. Any use case where two-way interactions and media sharing created better experiences was a sweet spot for the app.

Even today we are still seeing double digit growth, with a 15% increase during 2025, making it one of the fastest-scaling channels on our platform.

As a functionally rich messaging app it was also one of the key channels that businesses used to deploy chatbots, a trend that continues today.

Conversational AI WhatsApp interactions

RCS: Closing the gap between SMS and app messaging

After Infobip launched its RCS service in 2018, the channel scaled steadily over the following years, with the strongest growth in India. Growth patterns fluctuated as infrastructure matured, until the key moment when Apple started to support RCS on its devices with the release of iOS 18 in 2024.  

Following the rollout, global RCS traffic grew fivefold, with North America seeing message volumes rise by 14x in 2024 and a further 70x in 2025.

For RCS to grow in a region requires a high proportion of RCS-ready handsets and carriers to support the channel. This process has been slow to kick off in some countries, where SMS continues to dominate.

If you look at digital channels which support a conversational approach to B2C messaging, we can see how RCS has gained ground.

Global conversational channel share comparison

Voice and Video: The channels for human-to-human interactions

Voice and Video interactions generate lower volumes than text-based channels but deliver disproportionately high value per interaction. Telecom contact centers, healthcare providers, and enterprise support teams rely on voice and video for complex problem resolution, consultations, and scenarios requiring human judgment.

The pandemic revitalized Voice and Video as B2C channels with interactions growing 15x  between 2021 to 2025, driven by remote work, virtual support needs, and telehealth. This wasn’t a temporary adoption. By the end of 2025, voice and video interactions had established real-time communication as a standard part of customer support and service delivery. These interactions are now initiated and orchestrated through messaging platforms rather than operating independently, making them a key part of integrated customer journeys.

From multi-channel to true omnichannel

In the Omnichannel revolution section of the report we show how in a matter of years, the traffic on our platform has reflected this shift with 97.7% of traffic now sent by customers who use multiple channels, 
and 4 channels being the most common number used in terms of traffic volumes.

There are still a large number of small and medium sized businesses that use one, two, or three channels with us, but the enterprise global brands that we work with have fully embraced omnichannel communication.   

How is AI turning messaging into an engagement engine

After the launch of our chatbot building platform in 2020, we have seen both volume of interactions and the sophistication of chatbots increase exponentially. In only five years we have moved from simple AI in the form of guided chatbot flows, to conversational and generative AI, and with the launch of our Agentic AI platform we are seeing the next phase of the evolution.  

The four-phase evolution of AI-driven engagement

Industries with high-volume, repetitive interactions have benefited most from AI-driven conversations:

What 20 years of messaging reveals about the next phase

Over the past decade we have seen businesses change their approach to use the channels that customers prefer. Every country has its preferred messaging apps and unique way of communicating. Global businesses must adapt.

The future of business messaging won’t be defined by channel replacement, but by smarter orchestration: selecting the right channel for each moment, maintaining continuity across touchpoints, and measuring what drives real outcomes rather than just what generates volume.

The businesses that succeed in the next decade won’t be those sending the most messages, they’ll be those driving conversations that customers want to be involved in, that drive real outcomes, and that build stronger relationships over time.

There is no doubt that agentic AI will play a key role in enabling this process on a scale and across all channels. Our AgentOS platform is designed to orchestrate AI-driven customer interactions across workflows. It turns messaging from high-volume outreach into a precision engagement system where every interaction is measurable, optimizable, and designed to create long-term customer value.  

AgentOS represents where we are going as an AI-first organization. It will define not only the next 20 years of our business but how the entire messaging eco-system evolves.  

We are just starting.