Are bots dead now that we have flipped the calendar to the year of our AI overlord 2024? No, of course not, but they have changed or rather evolved. The state of play of play from the last few years of a bot being conceptualized as a little bubble on the bottom right corner of a website that lamely runs a customer (or potential customer) through a series of simple choices in a simple decisions tree only to kick them out to a boring old email flow after wasting a few minutes of their time is just obsolete. Organizations trying to replicate that old stale playbook should consider their goose more thoroughly cooked than uncle Jimbo’s Thanksgiving turkey that he assured aunt Sue he wouldn’t burn to a crisp like last year.
AI’s Influence: The advent of LLMs and in particular ChatGPT has fundamentally altered the bot landscape. While it’s true there’s a good deal of hype in the AI space, there truly are significant gains to be had by leveraging AI where it makes sense. This will of course be a case by case decision, but as we move through 2024 is going to be increasingly common.
Platform Specific Bots: Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Hangouts (or Google Chat or Google for Work – whatever they are calling it these days) have all added specific functionality for advanced user interfaces specific to bots in addition to their already robust public APIs. While there are some standard elements and patterns being codified, there are still advantages to be had by really leveraging each platforms unique advantages; for example Microsoft Teams has some great Sharepoint and OneDrive (the fancy enterprise one) functionality that can really boost user productivity.
Changing User Expectations: The days of your bot’s interface just being a floating chat bubble on the bottom right side of a webpage are over. Users expect access to bots in more than one interface. Sure your bot can have a dedicated web-based chat interface, but to maximize reach and user utility, you probably want to be available on at least Teams or Slack as a chat interface; though you will likely want to take advantage of some of those platform specific UI elements as well. My bet is that in 2024 we are going to see this go a step further. Bots are going to continue to have chat interface both on the web and in popular co-working apps, but they are also going to start interacting with more of what we might consider traditional PWA / web-app UIs; we’ve seen a lot of success with this for our Alice customers at The Mad Botter and it’s a trend that I think is likely going to continue, perhaps making what exactly the definition of “bot” is a bit fuzzier, but that’s a discussion for a different day.
What do you think? Have I bought the Cyberman orthodoxy too much? Are bots actually going the way of the dinosaur in 2024 or are they Cylon-like evolving? Let me know on Twitter and LinkedIn! And if you have automation needs for your business, take a look at Alice and reach out!
