What happened

Plenty of businesses already use a LINE Official Account to deal with customers: a customer adds the account as a friend and sends messages to book a time or ask about prices, and the owner or staff reply one message at a time. At its annual press event, LINE CONVERGE 2026, on 13 October, LINE Taiwan announced that it aims to launch an “AI agent platform” in the first quarter of 2027, letting businesses build their own AI agent in the back end of their Official Account to answer those messages.

An AI agent is an AI assistant that looks things up, compares prices and places orders for people; what they have in common is that they get the job done themselves. When people talk about AI agents, they usually mean the customer’s kind: the customer says what sort of business they want and when, and the agent goes online by itself to look, compare and book. What LINE is building sits on the business’s side: it lives in your Official Account, and when a customer sends a message, it checks schedules, answers questions and sorts out bookings for you.

According to LINE’s press release, the platform will start with three kinds of agent, for bookings, sales and customer service, and LINE says it wants brands and small businesses alike to be able to adopt them easily. You can build one by describing it in plain words: the role you want the AI to play and the services you want it to handle. If you need to, you can also connect it to the systems your business already uses for POS (checkout), membership, bookings and staff rotas. LINE’s example is a nail salon: a customer says in the Official Account which nail technician they’d like to book, and the agent checks the membership records, the technicians’ rota and the booking system, finds a suitable slot, and helps complete the booking once the customer confirms.

The platform isn’t ready yet, though. LINE expects to start validating it with partner brands at the end of this year, with a full launch in the first quarter of 2027 as the target; according to a Business Next report on 14 October, the platform is still in development and pricing hasn’t been decided. As of 26 October, LINE had not announced which plans will include it or how businesses can apply.

Why it matters to you

Say you run a hair salon in Keelung, and customers usually book a stylist or ask how much a colour costs through LINE. Suppose that once the platform launches, you build a booking agent in the back end and give it this year’s new prices, each stylist’s schedule, and your rule that changes to a booking need a day’s notice. But the price list on your website is still last year’s.

A customer who has just moved to Keelung wants a colour for around NT$3,000 and asks ChatGPT first. ChatGPT goes online to look, reads the old prices on your website and, when it describes your salon, says a colour costs NT$2,800. The customer adds you on LINE and asks your agent the same thing, and the agent, going by the new prices you gave it, replies NT$3,200. Both numbers came from you; the customer can’t tell which one is out of date, and just feels your salon says one thing and then another. Opening hours are the same story: you’ve opened on Mondays since earlier this year, but Google Maps still says closed on Mondays, so a customer looking for a Monday appointment sees that line on the map and moves straight past you, without ever adding you on LINE.

The agent’s NT$3,200 is right, because you handed it the new prices yourself. According to Business Next, businesses will build an agent by describing what they need in plain words, then following the system’s prompts to supply their own business information. As we understand it, what the agent knows is what you hand over: opening hours, prices, booking rules, and whether the shampoo and hair-care products you sell in the salon can be returned or exchanged. So the LINE back end becomes one more set of information about you, kept separately from what’s on your website and Google Maps.

And the copy in the LINE back end only comes into play once a customer has added you and sent a message. Before that, customers mostly get to know you through Google Search, Google Maps, or by asking AI tools like ChatGPT, and what those read is your website and the business information about you online. LINE hasn’t said whether ChatGPT and other outside AI tools can see the information you give your agent; until it does, we’re assuming they can’t. In other words, if you only change your prices in the LINE back end, what ChatGPT reads is still the version on your website.

So from now on, the same opening hours and prices will need to be written in three places: the LINE back end, your website and Google Maps; if you use booking or shopping platforms, add those too. If any one of them isn’t updated along with the others, customers will get different answers depending on where they come in.

What to do now

Yes, starting with your information. LINE’s platform is aimed at the first quarter of 2027, and there’s nowhere to apply yet; but the opening hours, prices and booking rules the agent will need on launch day are the same things customers read today when they ask ChatGPT or check Google Maps. Bring what your website and Google Maps say about them up to one current version now and it’s useful straight away; when the platform opens and you build an agent in the back end, you give it that same version.

It sounds like a quick edit to your website, but plenty of a business’s rules have never been written down. Whether you’ll still see a customer who’s 15 minutes late, whether deposits are refundable, how many days a customer has to come back after a colour: you and your stylists know the answers, and give them on the spot when a customer asks. While you’re replying one message at a time on LINE, leaving them unwritten gets by; once an agent and AI search are doing the answering, they have nothing to say about what isn’t written down, and each reads anything vague its own way. And because the rules are yours, you know them too well to spot, reading your own website, which ones never made it on there.

Someone who doesn’t know your shop will find the missing rules more easily by asking you. Once they’re found, they go onto your website, and Google Maps and your listings on booking and shopping platforms are brought into the same version. You can hand that whole part to our managed GEO service. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, and the engines here are AI tools like ChatGPT that write answers on their own; with managed GEO, our team fixes your site’s content, brings what’s said about you elsewhere into line, and regularly checks how each AI engine describes you; you just review the results. When LINE’s platform opens, you’ll already have a set of information that matches your website, ready to hand to the agent.

How ChatGPT describes you today is something you can find out right now, and you can ask it yourself; if you’d like someone to go through it with you line by line and spot what’s out of date, quiz ChatGPT on your prices and opening hours at our demo: a session with one of our consultants where they show you live. Taking the hair salon above, the consultant puts something a customer would ask, such as “a hair salon in Keelung that’s open on Mondays and does colour for around NT$3,000”, to ChatGPT there and then, and checks whether you’re on the list; and if you are, whether the prices and opening hours it gives are the latest ones you have. These are the same questions a LINE agent will be answering for customers every day. In the same session, the consultant will also show you your website’s GEO audit score. The GEO audit is geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which checks how well AI can understand your site and scores it across 12 areas.

Further reading