In 2016, Facebook opened up their messenger platform to developers and businesses to develop bots. Since then the messenger platform has come a long way with various updates which saw them bringing in templates, quick replies, persistent menus, webviews, messenger extensions, payments etc. This has helped developers continuously improve the experience of their bots. We have seen bots being developed for various use cases like Raising Awareness, Customer acquisition, Customer service, e-Commerce, Financial services etc.

Few years ago, at their 360 Summit, Gartner predicted that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. This prediction may have seemed audacious at the time but certainly looks to be true as companies are jumping on the chatbot bandwagon. The rush to adopt this new paradigm isn’t without cause though. Conversational interfaces, often combined with intelligent backends, are slowly transforming the fundamental way we use computers and software. Soon, every service delivered today via. website or app will be delivered via. bots. Every brand, business and startup will need to build bots. For brands, literally, every customer touch-point will now be enabled via. bots.