APAC businesses run in chat. Orders, approvals, payment confirmations, delivery adjustments: they happen in WhatsApp, Zalo, WeChat, and LINE. Not in enterprise software or procurement portals, but in the same apps people use to coordinate dinner plans and share family photos. This is how modern business operates across the fastest-growing markets in the world, and it's reshaping what business software needs to be.
According to a 2024 BCG study, 90% of Indonesian business communications happen through chat threads. There are over 400 million WhatsApp Business accounts globally, growing 35% year-over-year in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The reasons are straightforward: chat is fast, always-on, and where decisions actually get made. It's where customers, suppliers, and colleagues already are. Everyone already has the app installed. There's no software to deploy, no credentials to manage, no training required. When you need to coordinate with a new supplier or onboard a new customer, you ask for their WhatsApp number. They're ready to transact immediately.
The same platform handles personal and professional communication seamlessly. Your supplier might send a quote at 9am and photos of their kid at 9pm. It's one interface for all communication, eliminating the constant context-switching that enterprise software demands.
Many APAC businesses skipped the desktop era entirely. Their first computer was a smartphone. Their first business tool was a messaging app. Asking them to adopt desktop-first enterprise software is asking them to learn a foreign way of working.
Business in APAC is deeply relational. Deals happen through networks, and trust is built through conversation. Messaging platforms naturally support this style of business. Formal procurement portals and ticketing systems feel sterile and transactional in comparison.
But here's the problem… the accounting system isn't in the chat thread. So finance teams end up doing the glue work: Download the invoice. Or screenshot the receipt. Save it somewhere. Rename it so it's findable later. Manually key the data into the ERP. Chase approvals through more messages. Reconcile everything later when monthly close comes around. The ERP works. WhatsApp works. But the gap between them doesn't.
This manual bridging work is invisible to many business leaders because it's distributed across the organisation. The bookkeeper spends two hours each morning entering invoices. The operations manager copies order details from WhatsApp into the inventory system. The finance lead reconciles payment confirmations against bank statements.
Each individual task feels small, but aggregated across dozens of transactions per day, this represents significant lost productivity. More critically, it introduces errors at every transfer point. Every time data moves from a chat message to a formal system through manual re-entry, there's an opportunity for mistakes.
Critical business information lives in chat histories scattered across devices and platforms. When someone leaves the company, their chat history often leaves with them. When you need to find that supplier quote from three months ago, you're scrolling through thousands of messages hoping you remember the approximate timeframe.
There's no systematic way to search, no audit trail in your formal systems, and no way to analyze patterns across your communications. You're generating valuable business data every hour, but it evaporates into chat archives instead of accumulating as useful business intelligence.
Enterprise software companies built for a different world. They assumed businesses would adopt purpose-built applications for each function: procurement systems, invoicing platforms, CRM tools, project management software. That assumption worked in Western markets with different adoption patterns, higher software budgets, and desktop-first workflows, but it failed in APAC, where platforms have become the operating system layer for business operations.
Just as iOS and Android provide the foundation for mobile apps, WhatsApp and WeChat are becoming the foundation for business workflows. The interface is chat. The data model is conversations and attachments. The distribution is instant because everyone already has the app installed.
Smart companies are recognizing this shift and building accordingly. They're not trying to replace messaging platforms. They're building on top of them.
The unstructured nature of chat messages is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity. AI that can understand "Can you change that order from 50 units to 75?" and automatically update the relevant systems creates massive efficiency gains without requiring users to change how they communicate.
The real opportunity is connecting these messaging-based workflows to existing business systems. When an invoice arrives via WhatsApp, intelligent automation can extract the data, validate it against purchase orders, and post it to your accounting system without manual intervention. When a customer places an order through WeChat, it can automatically flow into your ERP and trigger fulfillment processes.
The goal isn't to make chat more like traditional software or to make traditional software more like chat. It's to preserve the benefits of both: the speed, accessibility, and natural interaction of messaging platforms combined with the structure, auditability, and analytical power of formal business systems.
This is exactly why we built FlowGo the way we did. We recognised that APAC SMEs aren't going to abandon WhatsApp and WeChat. They're not going to force suppliers onto procurement portals. They're not going to stop taking orders through messaging apps. And they shouldn't have to. Instead, FlowGo connects to those messaging platforms and to your existing on-premise ERP and accounting systems. We automate the workflow layer that's currently manual.
When an invoice arrives via WhatsApp, FlowGo extracts the relevant data using AI that understands context and format variations. We validate it against your purchase orders and business rules. We route it for approval if needed. Then we post it to your accounting system automatically. The entire process that used to take 10 minutes of manual work happens in seconds.
Your team keeps working the way they prefer, in the apps they already use. Your systems stay accurate and up-to-date. No manual re-entry. No information silos. No chaos as you scale.
We're not replacing your messaging platforms or your core business systems. We're making them work together as one continuous flow. If your business runs in chat, your finance workflows should too.
