After becoming increasingly popular in 2015 and 2016, this year has truly become the year of the bot. Countless businesses have embraced bot technologies, built applications supported by bots, deployed bots for varying purposes.<\/p>\r\n
There are bots “doing” marketing, sales, customer service, bots that connect employees to each other, bots that take up tasks for employees, even bots that cooperate with other bots. Look, for example at ordering bots like the one of pizza hut, marketing bots like GrowthBot<\/a>, or the variety of chatbots that send personalized messages to customers and prospects via Facebook’s messengers, Slack, or other messaging platforms; or have a look at the infrastructure that agent.ai<\/a> has built for customer service: bots collaborating with customers, employees, and themselves, governed by a bot, to deliver customer service.<\/p>\r\n There even have been opinions that bots will be the end of websites<\/a> and the death stroke for apps<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Still, in many cases businesses and organizations have not seen a good return.<\/p>\r\n And this in spite of bots having been touted as a panacea, a technology that resolves most, if not all business problems, that ultimately makes many a human redundant…<\/p>\r\n A bot is an application that consists of<\/p>\r\n Apart from the conversational user interface this cannot necessarily be identified from the users’ side.<\/p>\r\n Much!<\/p>\r\n Apart from the identification problem and the fact that some bots actually are not bots, there are problems on at least two dimensions. I would call these dimensions the technical and the “human” one.<\/p>\r\n On the technical side we see that:<\/p>\r\n Then there are challenges on the “Human” side, which include that:<\/p>\r\n Vendors are selling more than they can deliver. There is still a gold rush going on, and an important ingredient for successful bots, a well working AI to support it, is not yet up to the mark.<\/p>\r\n Businesses and organizations engaging into full-blown big bang implementations, without giving enough thought about how to deliver a good (enough) experience to customers and employees.<\/p>\r\n The combination leads to implementation failures.<\/p>\r\n A winning strategy addresses above challenges.<\/p>\r\n Humans want to interact with systems as convenient as possible. Part of this convenience is that the interaction is often taking the form of a conversation – often, not always. But it is still more than often enough to mean that bots are here to stay. Will they fully replace a “graphical” user interface? I do not think so, but they will augment it.<\/p>\r\nWhat is a Bot?<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
So, what went wrong?<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
What it Takes<\/h1>\r\n