Karachi startup builds AI assistant that lives inside WhatsApp business groups

A Karachi entrepreneur has built an AI assistant that works directly inside the WhatsApp groups Pakistani businesses already run on, answering questions using data pulled from a company's own accounting, inventory and sales systems.

Digital Tribe, an AI-first growth agency founded in Karachi in 2014, opened its founding partner programme for the tool, called Myyna, to its first five businesses on July 28, free of charge for 30 days.

Founder Fawaad Saleem said the idea grew out of a pattern he kept seeing at his agency: client relationships would begin with proper tools, shared inboxes, project management software, structured onboarding, only to collapse into a WhatsApp group within weeks. Invoices arrived as photographs. Delivery orders came as voice notes. Approvals happened in threads, often after office hours.

"At some point you stop treating that as a discipline problem to be fixed. The business is in the group chat. So we put the software in the group chat instead," Saleem said.

Rather than asking businesses to migrate to a new platform, Myyna joins a company's existing WhatsApp group as a participant. It requires no new application and no retraining. When someone asks a question in the group, such as a customer's outstanding balance, Myyna answers directly, citing which system the data came from and how recent it is.

The tool is built to handle the way Pakistani businesses actually communicate. A significant share of real business chat in Pakistan happens through Urdu voice notes and Roman Urdu text, formats that conventional AI tools built for Western offices typically cannot parse. Myyna transcribes voice notes on Digital Tribe's own servers, without sending them to third parties, and can read payment screenshots from services like JazzCash and Easypaisa, matching them against invoices for a person to confirm.

The system is designed to be read-only, restricted at the code level from changing prices, releasing orders or moving money. Where a document or action is needed, it prepares a draft for a named person to approve. If a connected system is unreachable or its data is outdated, Myyna says so rather than offering an estimate, a design principle Saleem describes as avoiding "a confident wrong number."

Myyna's commitment-tracking feature, which flags promises made in chat such as "I'll send it Tuesday", was tested against a real two-year WhatsApp group from a Karachi retailer, spanning 4,393 messages from June 2024 to July 2026. Against a human-labelled set of 36 genuine commitments, the system identified 81% of them, with 97% of its flagged items confirmed as real commitments.

Two of Myyna's six planned agents, Secretary and Operations, are live today, with Finance, Sales, Marketing and HR still in development. The tool connects to accounting and business platforms including QuickBooks, Xero, Tally, SAP Business One, ERPNext, Odoo, Shopify and Google Sheets.