Creating a Business Entirely from Digital Workers (Expert Chatbots)

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Riza Berkan

We are not too far away from creating a completely digital business with a single human (the owner) setting it up. A recent Forbes article mentions the possibility of replacing managers in a futuristic tone encouraged by the advances in blockchain and IoT, A Harvard Business Review article introduces iCEO, a software that makes executive decisions. All these developments are taking us to this ultimate goal.

Autonomous Digital Business is a concept much closer to reality than chips in the brain, or self-driving cars on the streets.

Current businesses are already “digital” in so many aspects. Automated trading in stock market was a pioneering example of how buying and selling decisions can be delegated to smart computers, and they have been operating for a while now. If we can trust computers with stock trading, why not trust them with our business decisions for buying, selling, hiring, etc.?

Amazon, for example, might be rated 70% digital considering all its web operations and robotic warehouses. As conversational agents (chatbots) steadily penetrating into the CRM and sales operations, the percentage of digital business is increasing. But can it be all “digital” comprised of agents and expert chatbots? Can we delegate all decision making roles to computerized agents to run our businesses?

Expert Chatbots Making Decisions

Our current understanding of the chatbots is not sophisticated enough to make them run a business autonomously. However, “expert” chatbots are a different ball game. I had explained in an article earlier how they differ from conventional chatbots. In a nut shell, an expert chatbot communicates with humans plus makes decisions based on the expertise it has. At exClone, we have seeded the first steps of this vision.

In the short term, the following decisions can be expected to be made from AI agents/expert chatbots in the realm of digital business:

This is a simplified view of all possible conversational decision systems applicable to businesses. In this simple model, the business owner would interact with an executive chatbot to control and manage her business.

This picture depicts a digitalization scheme via AI in its most naive form, with a potential to signal what the future holds.

Barriers to Entry

The most important parameter in this transition is the ability to create expert chatbots easily without deploying expensive scientific projects. Here is the list of 10 requirements to win in this race:

1- No coding effort should be required.
2- Deployment should be fast (as opposed to lengthly training/learning procedures)
3- Data requirement should be limited to the content of the expertise (as opposed to vast amounts of training data to be collected)
4- Easy to fix and modify (as opposed to black box approaches that require re-training the system)
5- Building an expert chatbot must be an editorial effort, not much different than writing a blog post.
6- Builders of expert chatbots should be experts themselves without the involvement of developers or scientists.
7- Should be able to converse effectively, yield reasonable advice, and make sensible decisions.
8- Must have a certain level of awareness to be able to analyze its conversations and make deductions.
9- Must be able to learn from overall operation by evaluating its objective function.
10- It should be easily deployed in all communication channels/platforms ranging from SMS to Slack.

The winning development platform must address all the issues listed above. Most of the current platforms offered by big corporations (Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, Facebook) do not meet half of these criteria, and are targeted solely to developers, not to business experts.

How will the Future of Business Look Like?

There are several measurements that apply to business valuation today such as the market cap, EBITA, gross revenue, number of employees, etc. But none of these conventional measurements indicate how close the company is to scaling upward. The rate of digitalization could be such a measurement to fill in this gap.

A new key measurement of company valuation in Wallstreet will be the “Rate of Digitalization” in the near future.

Consider Amazon again. Let’s imagine a rival, equal size, equal volume, but everything done by hand (human labor). Who would you invest in? Amazon or the rival? Knowing the degree of digitalization in Amazon, the natural choice would be her. This extreme hypothetical example emphasizes the value of this new parameter. Today, it is all blurred in the narrative interpretations of stock analysts.

Far into the future, it is fair to assume that Fortune 500 list will start to include businesses entirely digital (automated) with few human owners or controllers.

DIGITAL CLONING: How Expertise can be Commoditized by AI Driven Chatbots

Posted on March 22, 2017 by Riza Berkan

Biological cloning may be an immortal way to pass on our individual genetic information, but in digital form it offers something quite different: A new robotic society of expert chatbots as a part of our new digital life. Before digging deeper, let’s define what it is.

Digital Cloning is the duplication of a cognitive function based on the duplication of its source data (knowledge). Only duplicating data (text, image, video, sound, etc.) is not cloning just as how duplicating only DNA would not be cloning in biology.

Digital Cloning of Expertise is duplicating some particular expert knowledge along with its delivery mechanism, in this case a chatbot. In order to satisfy the criteria of digital cloning, such a chatbot is required to present expert knowledge in a useful way as well as answering related questions at a reasonable rate. Note that we are talking about “expert” chatbots here but not transactional chatbots where they book your flight or arrange your calendars. The difference between expert chatbots and transactional chatbots was explained in one of my earlier articles.

Digital cloning this way also includes persona, personal emphasis and choices since no two experts in the same field are the same. Personal variation is what makes combined expertise very powerful, always surpassing an individual expert’s opinion. Personal choices also reflect how expert content is curated to be cloned by its designer.

Expertise is the Most Valuable Commodity if it can be Shared
Expertise can be anything. It can be as simple as how to build a kite, or as complicated as how to perform a brain surgery. We all have some kind of expertise, some ideas, some vision, and stories to tell. In the enterprise world, expert knowledge is even more valuable since it is the driving force of business success. But expertise is only valuable if it is actionable. For that, expertise must be alive, always available, easy to share, easy to be consumed.

In today’s world, knowledge is shared in static (dead) forms of delivery methods: publications. Regardless of where they are published, and how long they buzzed or viewed, their destiny is ARCHIVES, which is a digital wasteland.

In Today’s World, Knowledge and Expertise Fade Away like Ocean Waves Breaking on a Beach and Retreating Back

This process resembles to ocean waves breaking on a beach (published), then retreating back (archived). They are at the mercy of Google’s ability to bring them to search queries. Worse than that, if such publications are within an enterprise environment where even Google cannot help you, their shelf-life will be even shorter comparable to how long the promoting emails are kept relevant, or how well you can query a database.

Accordingly, intellectual efforts made on a regular basis have no safe harbor to remain alive using our current digital systems other than being deposited somewhere (online or offline) including posting on social media, blogs, websites or corporate networks. You would agree with this point better when you catch yourself smiling upon discovering an old document on your computer with full of great ideas.

Immortalizing Ideas, Visions, Experiences, and Expertise
One way to keep one’s expert knowledge alive is digital cloning via chatbots. This must be a very simple process at the level of editorial effort not much different than blog writing. If it gets any more complicated than that, the demographics of digital cloning will be quite limited, and the anticipated affect will not emerge.

Digital cloning via expert chatbots is a new form of digital presence. Unlike the existing forms of digital presence such as facebook page, twitter account, or personal blog, an expert chatbot can maintain all your expert knowledge equally shareable regardless of when they were entered into the system. Every time you add some valuable knowledge, it enriches your chatbot’s response capability. People chatting with your chatbot would be presented your expertise, and would get answers to their questions. In addition, conversation logs can provide ultimate transparency to people’s concerns, curiosities, and demands relevant to the expertise served.

Community of Expert Chatbots in an Enterprise
Digital cloning concept offers tremendous advantages for enterprises in applications including, but not limited to, training, employee assistance, sales agents, help desk, and many other similar knowledge rich tasks. Managers and workers can clone themselves to offer an alternative communication channel within a company for all sorts of purposes. Expert chatbots can be created using databases and data silos for deep content (big data), converting such data driven systems into conversational experts. With such a transformation, we can start to assess the value of companies by their commoditization capability of expertise internally as well as externally.

A Society of Digitally Cloned Chatbots

Expert chatbots can refer to each other even for the same subject matter expertise very similar to how we use links in documents. This allows users to switch from one chatbot to another without a need for external search. Collaboration between chatbots in this manner will be the corner stone of the emergence of a robotic society in the mirror image of ourselves. Not to mention, a certain level of competition will emerge among the clones measured by who is the most popular expert chatbot based on number of referrals.

The emergence of such an ecosystem would redefine how we interact with computers, and would change our role from being sole digital workers to being part-time human parents of digital clones.

Such a transformation will also challenge the immortality arguments since biological death would no longer be 100% loss of one’s expertise and persona. One thing is for sure, all these possibilities are not a science fiction story any more, they are all here around the corner.

You can read my other articles on linkedin if you are patient enough to dig through, or you can wait until I clone myself (which I am in the process of doing it) and talk to my expert chatbot. You may even be able to hear my voice! Until then, stay tuned and join our CHATBOTS Group on Linkedin.

exClone in Hall of Fame of Chatbots in a Survey of 2017

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Riza Berkan

We are proud to be selected to be in top 5 chatbots in a market survey of chatbots 2017. The survey highlights the state of the chatbot market as of 2017, presented in 20 slides. There are interesting findings in this study worth reading.

A RESEARCH STUDY BY MINDBOWSER IN ASSOCIATION WITH ‘CHATBOTS JOURNAL: 300+ individuals participated from wide array of industries including Online Retail, Aviation, Logistics, Supply Chain, e-commerce, Hospitality, Education, Technology, Manufacturing and Marketing & Advertising.

Chatbots on Websites

Some interesting facts emerging from this study are listed below. The chart below shows that 80% of businesses want to launch a chatbot on their Website, which is an important data for us at exClone. Our upcoming platform allows integration to all platforms, but is mainly servicing chatbots on Websites and MS Sharepoint/Azure platforms.

Industries: Transactional Chatbots vs Expert Chatbots

While e-commerce is strictly in transactional category, the rest of the industries in this chart is in our territory of expert chatbots.

Assistants and Agents

The first two categories of business functions are perfectly inline with our value proposition at exClone.

Our new Competition Ground

Our new platform will enter into this chart of competitors. We claim to be the first platform with NO coding, and NO AI experience required, the hallmark of our Digital Cloning technology.

Future Looks Good

Chatbot technology is definitely a major disruption of the near future. Our fantasies of talking computers, which shaped up since the first episode of Start Trek, have constantly been fed with sci-fi movies during the last 5 decades that provided a concrete, historical user expectation in all demographics.

Disclaimer: exClone has no commercial or advertorial relationship with Mindbowser or Chatbots Journal.

To download the PDF file, please click here.

exClone Partners with Maana: How to Turn Data into Knowledge, then Talk to it via Chatbots

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Riza Berkan

We are proud to announce a new partnership with MAANA, a pioneering tech company that turns data into actionable knowledge to accelarate enterprise profitability. The objective of this collaboration is to add a communication option where the users of the knowledge platform interact with the system via the most casual, natural, and untrained conversations. The vision of bringing knowledge/data assistants into operational workflows is remarkable from the stand point of industrial artificial intelligence (AI).

In this article, we will share a simplified description of the problem at hand, and the path to its solution in its most general manner. The modes of conversation presented at the bottom of the article are self-descriptive value propositions as to how access to knowledge can be accelerated.

Before I do that let me briefly explain what Maana knowledge platform does and how exClone technology works with it.

The Maana Knowledge Platform is used by the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world and is uniquely designed to enable subject-matter experts to quickly build hundreds of interconnected models that encode the expertise of subject-matter experts combined with data from across silos in the context of optimizing an asset or workflow. These knowledge models provide continuous, actionable recommendations into the operations of assets and workflows enabling faster and better daily decisions by thousands of employees that result in increased enterprise profitability.

What can Chatbot Communication bring to the table?

In its most simplified strawman drawing, turning data into knowledge requires handling of 5 technical problems collectively. Going from bottom to top, they are (1) data silos and data lakes, (2) integration, (3) analysis, (4) retrieval, and (5) communication.

At the top layer, communication function must allow the users interact with the system in the most casual, natural, and untrained manner. That’s where chatbots play an important role as being a part of the last ring of the chain.

You might as well consider chatbot as a waitress/waiter in a restaurant. Despite the massive operation in the kitchen and abundance of meal options, the only interface you would have with this system would be her/him. A typical customer – waitress interaction lays out all possible combinations that a chatbot must handle.

Going over the menu: A typical and most common interaction where the customer is presented options to chose from and the questions about the options are answered.
Questions without the menu: An interaction where customer choses to investigate options without looking at the menu, and such questions must be answered impromptu which may sometimes lead to a menu item.
Specials: An introductory style of interaction where the waitress takes an active step to assist the customer about the best options for that particular moment in time before any conversation starts.
Remembering the customer: An interaction with a known customer where previously used options are brought up, and the customer is alerted to the variations from the previous state of affairs.

These 4 types of interactions are the range of information service applicable to all chatbot applications. Bringing these on the table of knowledge platform, however, has some unique challenges.

How Does a Chatbot Serve Knowledge Platforms?

There are 5 main functions of a chatbot to bridge the gap between the end-user and a knowledge platform as shown in the simplified diagram below.

Interface: Chatbot interfaces are usually simple and SMS like, which are enriched with image and video insertions. They are particularly popular for their advantages in the ever growing mobile device usage. No special requirements would apply to interface design that could be attributable to the knowledge platform.

Decision: This is the state information of the ongoing conversation where the system (1) qualifies if the user’s response needs to be sent to the knowledge platform, (2) if there are options to present for navigating to the next level, (3) if the current response is the continuation of the previous response via short-term memory, (4) if the user must be helped according to his/her historical choices, and (5) if the user’s response is related to the answers in the short-term memory. This list is actually much larger with details that belong to the type of application and nature of the knowledge operation.

Translation: This step translates a qualified English sentence (qualified by the Decision step) to a system specific retrieval command(s) within the knowledge platform. This translation requires ontological parsing of the English sentence then formation of it in the new language.

Generation: Once the result is retrieved, it has to be put into an English sentence for better communication. This seemingly simple task can actually be quite challenging, and is also known as the generation problem in computational linguistics. Bite-size information is a concept that has to be decided for the generation step according to the objective of the chatbot. For example, if the chatbot is helping with federal regulations, then the bite-size information can be a full sentence, or sometimes a paragraph, of unedited original text, with very little generation challenge. However, with numerical data, diagrams, tables, images, or video, the bite-size determination can be a difficult task.

Navigation: This step requires an independent cycle of communication with the knowledge platform to harvest available options of navigation. Usually, the options within the knowledge domain are mirrored at the chatbot level so that the users can access knowledge with less effort.

Modes of Conversation

There are various modes of conversations that a chatbot can conduct, making this interaction much more valuable than using a static, single-step search box. Here are some of these possibilities using a hypothetical content.

Case A above shows an impromptu answer (4,788 tons) presented with the generation capability. Case B and C show how chatbots can utilize their short-term memory to suggest alternatives and navigation options while remembering important aspects of the original query that was asked 2, 3, and sometimes 4 steps earlier. While the knowledge platform was utilized in A, the responses B and C may come from the chatbot itself depending on the availability of embedded (learned) content. Also note that the clickable options are very useful especially when the chatbot is used on a mobile device.

Case D shows a possible exchange to narrow down the type of analysis available in the knowledge platform domain before it has been retrieved. Case E illustrates long-term memory to continue the previous conversation which can eliminate unnecessary steps to reach back to the same point. Case F shows that knowledge platform and chatbot can create alerts to indicate updates in the back end.

These are some of the possible exchanges that could be achieved from chatbot – knowledge platform combination.

Conversational Analytics … Enough Reason to Launch a Chatbot for your Business.

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Riza Berkan

It is fair to say that “conversational analytics” does not exist today. Even if some companies may already be using it via Twitter type feeds, it is still an untouched territory in the mass scale of the Internet business.

Conversational analytics is a gold mine of user feedback, and there is nothing better than seeing praises and complaints articulated openly in their most naked form.

Web Analytics Versus Conversational Analytics

If you have a business relying on the Internet presence, you are most likely familiar with these terms of Web analytics: Bounce Rate, Conversion Rate, Time Spent, etc. In the absence of a recorded conversation with visitors, these measures are the only tool to guess the visitors’ intent and feedback. Hence, the concept of growth hacking has emerged to launch a trial and error process to improve presentations one step at a time. If you had a chatbot recording conversations about your products and services, then you would experience a major advantage:

Web analytics only shows you how your existing presentation performs (in time). Conversational analytics shows you what you are missing (instantly).

Conversational analytics, even before forming a statistical result, would constantly indicate the weaknesses of your presentation through user feedback like this: I cannot find your address … why should I buy this… when will this be available… where is the information related to….

Human Assisted Chatlines Versus Chatbots

Recently, human-assisted chatlines have been increasing in numbers deployed for marketing and support operations. It can obviously be very expensive to maintain such operations and conversational analytics obtained from them can be too few in quantity. In a manner of self-fulfilling prophecy, the meaning of conversational analytics is often reduced to managing FAQs where the identified FAQs would still keep the same human labor busy, perhaps 90% of the time. Chatbot effect is shown in the diagram below. Note that a Chatbot is not an FAQ machine, however if designed properly it can handle most of the FAQs while reserving human labor for more in-depth conversations.

Not only the bulk of the human labor can be eliminated by chatbots, but also the conversational analytics would have a different information embedded in them. For example, people may be asking “what is the price?” repeatedly. If this information was handled, they would move on to ask “Do you have any volume discounts?” If that was handled, they could move on to ask another more detailed question. Before human operator is engaged a chatbot can pave the way for more in depth questions to arise from the visitors which would otherwise emerge while keeping human labor busy. Since human labor is expensive, and slow, some of such questions would never reach the business without a chatbot implementation.

Conversational Analytics Behind a Firewall

Remember the old way of maintaining a complaint box in the entrance of offices? For internal operations, a chatbot assisting employees in an anonymous manner could be a real value, sometimes priceless feedback to the management. Otherwise, for obvious reasons, many suggestions and complaints may not surface to maintain the employee-employer relationships, which would progressively result in blind operations.

Upper management can show its confidence by deploying an anonymous chatbot for suggestions and complaints.

Anonymous or not, and internal chatbot could provide valuable information to the upper management to include, but not limited to, these factors:

Suggestions for operational and business matters to upper management
Information needs to conduct mission critical operations
Satisfaction levels with compensation and benefits
Promotional expectations and ambitions
Readiness for emergencies, safety, and security tutorials.
Maintenance support, remembering training knowledge quickly on the spot

All these needs of the employees would become transparent in conversational analytics as a byproduct of using an internal chatbot.

Stay tuned for exClone‘s upcoming announcements of chatbot development for enterprises. Join our linkedin group of CHATBOTS for similar articles.

LiveTiles Presentation of Chatbots by exClone

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Riza Berkan

We had an exciting gathering last Friday at the LiveTiles office to explore future directions via LiveTiles platform, digital workplace. LiveTiles offers a unique tool to curate and create content that is relevant to vertical needs of an enterprise without any coding requirement. Now, through the same channel, artificial intelligence applications can reach Sharepoint users one of which is exClone’s expert chatbots.

We have demonstrated Wendy, an example of employee assistant that can be launched by any enterprise using their own content. The example included simple interaction of Wendy bringing health benefits information and answering questions. Wendy’s expertise can include health insurance policies as well as all other different benefit information.

There is literally no limit to the type of content that can be curated as part of Wendy’s expertise. For example, a derivative of Wendy can be created to include training material, compliance, in-house surveys, and employee testing. One of the most important properties of exClone is to allow chatbot creators to develop a chatbot in a single-step machine learning process. Similar to LiveTiles feature, chatbot creation with exClone does not require any coding or any working knowledge of AI. This is how Wendy looks like through LiveTiles platform.

More about Wendy will be announced soon. Stay tuned for an exciting future!

exClone Chatbot, Debate Guide, on The Wall Street Journal’s Politics Front Page

Posted on September 28, 2016 by Riza Berkan

exClone’s chatbot, called Debate Guide, which is developed for The Wall Street Journal, has made it to the Politics front page last night following the 1st presidential debate. It is titled as “DEBATE DATABASE” positioned on the right top corner.
The exClone, Debate Guide, is an example of how chatbots deliver a simple conversational search function. It has received over 60,000 conversations so far, showing high engagement rate. We will report conversational analytics of this operation after the election in November 8th, 2016. You can try Debate Guide and examine what the presidential candidates said during prime-time debates.

6 Reasons Why Chatbots are the Next Gold Rush in Tech World

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Riza Berkan

The term “chatbot” is on its way to become a household concept sooner than anyone has expected. Although chatbots have been around nearly three decades, their promise have just recently started to accelerate in the media. The emergence of mobile devices equipped with voice recognition apps contributed to this upsurge. Also, a more diluted name “digital assistant” helped people’s perception. However, the user acceptance bar is still very high with chatbots unlike many other applications. Is the science and technology finally caught up to pass this bar? Here are the six reasons that summarize the gold rush nature of the chatbot business.

1- THE HOLLYWOOD EFFECT

Talking computers have been in the movies since the first few episodes of Star Trek. An intelligent computer, that talks with a sexy voice, knowing everything possible to know, advising us what to do, has been the central theme of almost every science fiction movie. Finally, we hit a point where it has become such an expected functionality, that less than a perfect talking robot is unthinkable. Hollywood effect is real, and shapes consumer expectation perhaps beyond what is usually acceptable from a computer program. We are very accustomed to Windows OS messing up in the middle of an important work, but we will not tolerate less than a perfect chatbot. WE ARE LONG OVERDUE FOR SOME REAL LIFE EXAMPLES OF TALKING COMPUTERS THAT DELIVER SENSIBLE CONVERSATIONS, THANKS TO HOLLYWOOD.

2- BIG PLAYERS ENTERING THE GAME

Do you remember Microsoft’s Ms. Dewey? This chatbot with nice graphical interface was released almost a decade ago and failed quickly afterwards. Perhaps she was too early for her time. Nevertheless, Microsoft showed its soft underbelly by proving that they could release high tech products without actually understanding the challenges behind the technology and its underlying science. A decade later, Cortana is not any better, making people wonder what did Microsoft learn during the last decade? Almost to the point, another blunder with Tay Twitter app does not seem to dampen any spirits in Microsoft. Chatbot technology has become a shameless trial-and-error game, maybe because Apple could stomach Siri, a seriously limited gadget, a joking material. We can add Amazon’s Echo to the list, and now Facebook’s API release. At least, Facebook is moving more cautiously by spreading the responsibility to independent developers. IBM’s stake in this game is only to be seen in TV commercials. There is no public launch of any chatbot to avoid public scrutiny. Google is also experimenting with chatbots without a convincing public demo. Despite the blunders and overpromised hype, the entrance of the big players into the Chatbot game is a positive development. SOME OF THE BIG PLAYERS ARE TAKING THE RISK OF PUBLIC MOCKERY AND DAMAGE TO THEIR BRAND JUST TO BE IN THE CHATBOT WORLD. That means the gold rush is on!

3- HUGE POTENTIAL IN CUSTOMER SERVICE

We may have landed on the moon several times, but the state of the customer service today is based on sheer human labor. The nature of this job is boring, repetitious, and stressful, not much different than the rowers in this Charlton Heston movie. If we round up helpdesk, tech support, and corporate training industries, we are talking about $50 billion market segment that is a sitting duck for computerized automation. Only if the computers can talk and solve problems adequately.

THE CHATBOT USAGE IN CUSTOMER SERVICE MARKET IS LESS THAN 0.01% INDICATING AN UNTAPPED COMMERCIAL TERRITORY. The current suppliers are half-dozen startups none of which is worth mentioning at this stage. There are, however, chat-line providers that connect visitors to human agents. Obviously, chatting live with human agents does not change the human labor requirement, its mathematics remain the same. Therefore, we should not confuse chat-line technology with chatbot technology although they can complement each other.

4- ROBOTS AND SMART TOYS ARE ON THE RISE

There is an unstoppable wave of robotic products coming to the market. Led by Japan, and South Korea these robots can do incredible tricks, except for less than decent conversation skills. CHATBOTS ARE A NATURAL FIT TO ROBOTICS. Therefore, a skillful chatbot technology can flourish in this market segment. You may run into Connie, Hilton’s new robot concierge with primitive skills. IBM’s Watson was not impressive with this example, yet it still showed us what to expect in the near future. Then, there are vehicles that can talk to its driver. In-car voice recognition still has some way to go. However, a few automakers are taking the lead in creating in-car interfaces that are easy to use. Among the favorites are Acura and Honda, Infiniti, Mercedes, and Ford. It would make sense to keep your hands on the steering wheel, and eyes on the road while you talk to a chatbot for various purposes. But this is only the opening act. There is a huge realm of industrial machines. Operating each one of them require expertise and knowledge, and chatting with them could improve safety and enhance efficiency. This list goes on and on. Bottom line, every machine can talk to humans sometime in the future if it makes commercial sense.

5- CHATBOTS CAN BE A NEW FORM OF SOCIAL DIGITAL PRESENCE

It all started with a Website concept in 1990s. A person could have his/her own Website. Then, it was automated by MySpace. Then came the personal blogs. Social networks like Facebook and Linkedin, followed by YouTube and Twitter, they all presented a new form of digital presence of one’s self image on the Internet. Now, what if you had your own chatbot?

Your chatbot could represent who you are, your skills, perhaps the products you sell, services you offer. Is that possible? The answer is yes, of course. CHATBOTS WILL BECOME THE ULTIMATE FORM OF SELF EXPRESSION, AND PERSONAL PROMOTION. The only stumbling block on the way is the accuracy of chatbot technology and ability to automate creation. Personal chatbots are likely to appear in the celebrity circles first, then spread to professionals like lawyers, doctors, dentists, and financial advisors. The commercial aspect of this development is strongly related to the c-commerce potential, which is my next point below.

6- CHAT IS C-COMMERCE, A NEW CHANNEL FOR SALES

Sending messages has become a landmark behavior in the timeline of human evolution. Billions of messages are sent daily across the globe. Facebook Messenger, Google Chat, Skype, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slate, and many other platforms allow sending and receiving messages, none of which has been commercialized. CHATBOTS ARE THE NEW SALES CHANNEL AND DEFINE C-COMMERCE.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg recently said “You never have to call 1-800 FLOWERS anymore” referring to Facebook’s Chatbot APIs mainly targeted for ecommerce and retail operations over the social network. Perhaps, we will remember Facebook down the road as being the visionary company to open up this new channel.

Out of 6 reasons listed above, the C-commerce virtue of chatbots is perhaps the strongest argument for expecting a gold rush. Sales dialogue is relatively easier for chatbots to handle, and there is money in the electronic commerce world floating back and forth. C-commerce is likely to be the fastest realization of ROI in this segment.

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This article is brought to you by exClone.com, a new chatbot technology provider. You can follow exClone in Facebook, and LinkedIn. To follow chatbot related discussions and news, please join CHATBOTS group in linkedin.

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