How Chatbots will overtake the app in 2017

Editor's Notes

• #2 As we kick off the day, Bruno offered us some exciting news for the role of chatbots in developer experience and the API economy. Now I’m going to offer you the business proposition of why — no matter what your API is — you should be considering turning it into a chatbot, connecting to a chatbot and just leveraging the omnipresence of messenger apps in our lives
• #3 How many people here are using chatbots in their daily lives? How many people have integrated or created your own chatbots? How many have chatbots a part of your product roadmap? Just like how back in 1981 video killed the radio star, 2017 is looking like the year that the chatbot will kill the the mainstream app
• #4 Experience designer Dan Harvey aptly said that conversation is the command line of tomorrow. Since the 60s we have needed the right syntax and grammar to tell computers what to do. Now we can just tell it what to do and it usually does it! And on the cusp of fulfilling Turing’s vision, now the chatbot interacts with you to continue learning what you’re looking for and how better to guide you.
• #6 The near future of the Internet of Things has us having conversations with inanimate, yet increasingly animated objects There’s no need to click or swipe. Maybe you’ll type, increasingly you’ll speak It’s intuitive, reactionary and contextual, something that Siri with her pithy one liners is nowhere near. You ask Siri “What’s the weather in Barcelona next weekend?” And she’ll respond with the temperature. While she’s always listening, she isn’t sophisticated enough to compound that learning and relating your first question with the next. If it’s going to be nice weather, you can ask more advanced chatbots “Check to see if there are cheap tickets” and if you are living in London like me, it’ll not only infer that you want to mean tickets to Barcelona but plane tickets, showing results from RyanAir, Vueling and Norwegian. As the chatbot machine learning continues, they will start anticipating and suggesting like “Ooh look at this hotel deal. And Barca’s in town if you want to buy tickets now.”
• #7 Chat apps are already our most used apps FB Messenger is #10
• #8 Messenger Apps have already slaughtered SMS FB Messenger has more than a billion users Snapchat 60 million in just the US and Canada And WhatsApp saw seven million messages sent last year.
• #9 It’s not just fun chatting, but business too. I thought at first this number was ridiculous but then I realized my Slack addiction is real.
• #10 Chatbots are built right into our common flow of communication in the apps we use most so by integrating with your API, you get access to that train of thought. Also, I’m a marketer so I know that Facebook Ads are way more successful than AdWords or Bing. Why? Simply put, we naturally let our guard down when we are on our favorite social network. That means we are much more likely to make purchases from inside Messenger than from inside other apps. And as Chatbots get smarter, it’ll start reacting to what we were thinking now, instead of popups based on our previous search history.
• #11 Chatbots are built right into our common flow of communication in the apps we use most so by integrating with your API, you get access to that train of thought. Also, I’m a marketer so I know that Facebook Ads are way more successful than AdWords or Bing. Why? Simply put, we naturally let our guard down when we are on our favorite social network. That means we are much more likely to make purchases from inside Messenger than from inside other apps. And as Chatbots get smarter, it’ll start reacting to what we were thinking now, instead of popups based on our previous search history.
• #12 Marc Andersson so famously said that Software is eating the world but now his colleague at the VC firm said that We can now or soon just live in messenger and like Hitch all software tools will now expand to include chatbots and messaging service.
• #13 So why do we like chatbots? More and more our communication is continuous and asynchronous. When’s the last time you wrote BRB - be right back in a conversation? We take if for granted that we can just drop off and pick the conversation back up later. Chatbots are more intimate = after a decade of oversharing on social media, Chatbots give us a more intimate two-way form of communication again cheaper = it cuts on labor for tech support but it also helps you cross-sell and upsell. Plus since it’s all in the cloud, you can build it from anywhere. it’s more efficient because it’s where we’re communicating already and everything flows together.
• #14 But it’s not all groovy. In August, Gartner threw Chatbots into it’s Trough of Disillusionment, arguing just four months after Facebook launched its chatbot marketplace, us regular humans aren’t ready for it yet.
• #15 So yes it’ll still be the year of the Rooster, but of the chatbot too. Because while we don’t really know or understand how to interact with Chatbots just yet, we know we want them, with 61 percent of consumers assuming it’s our near reality.
• #16 But certainly chatbot is how we get artificial intelligence to go mainstream, but it’s just simply not that smart yet. The chatbot will be how we test AI at scale really out in the wild and, with machine learning and natural language processing, it’ll continually improve. That’s why I’m pegging next year, not 2016.
• #18 It’s not the tech that’s keeping the Chatbot from climbing to Gartner’s Plateau of Productivity, it’s the money. Forget the Big Data. Forget the improving AI. How can you make money now by connecting to a chatbot?
• #19 Customer service is going to really benefit from it. - Customer support is one of the most resource-intensive departments and it’s one of the hardest to equate that expense with real return on investment - McKinsey estimates 29% of customer support positions can be automated by chatbots today. Gartner has this number at 85% in just three more years - We literally dread picking up the phone to call tech support. Another study found that 43% of consumers said that, in a perfect world, all customer service should be done through intelligent assistants or chatbots. We’re used to not talking to people and we really don’t want to. It takes care of all the basics. What time do open? What time is hotel checkout? Do you integrate with this other tool? This isn’t even machine learning, this first level of chatbot is a resourceful and interactive knowledgebase, FAQ, and resource documentation. We’re more and more impatient. In fact, half of us expect a response time within 24 hours, 7 days a week Of course you know that when you automate repetitive tasks, you open up a lot more room for innovation. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel by building a customer support functionality into your app or having customers download an app at all for you. Build it into what they already have
• #20 Of course the best way to make money, is to enable people to give you it. China’s WeChat has been doing this for awhile now. On the eve of the last Chinese New Year, more people sent “lucky money” over WeChat in one night than all the total transactions made via PayPal in 2015. As of this past September, now the Facebook Messenger bots are able to accept money for you right there, instead of having to open up a browser or app to finish the transaction. Any time you can smooth payment processes with fewer steps and windows, the less cart abandonment you’ll have.
• #21 As consumers we aren’t quite accustomed to chatbots because we love the user experience of the app. That’s why many are arguing that it’ll be the enterprise space that will really be the first chatbot adopters. From Cisco to Slack, billions is being spent specifically on this space. With everything in the same place, like all the Slackbot integrations, workplace productivity doesn’t have you jumping around to set meeting times, check your calendar, and collaborate on projects. Now it’s not perfect, as my team at Happy Melly has removed the majority of our Slack plugins finding it really disruptive to our communication, but the Slackbot itself makes onboarding our hundreds of virtual community members super easy and it makes it easy for us to jump on scheduled calls. But let’s face it, the current enterprise software space is bulky and overwhelming. APIs and chatbots have to be at the helm to improve that user experience. And if you’re a freelancer or knowledge worker like me, you are wasting so much time doing the admin work that has nada to do with your job that leveraging chatbots to streamline invoicing and setting meetings could save us a lot of time. What will really save time and money is using APIs to connect to bot extensions that will help existing software and platforms.
• #22 I for one welcome our new robot overlords. So what are you waiting for?
• #23 Thank you! Now make sure you leverage this conference by tweeting a lot and networking to share your passion with the community!