Zuckerberg’s Shiny AI Bot-Driven Future?

Or just Facebook’s next play to capture yet more of your digital day?

The news that Facebook is extending its Messenger platform and encouraging its developer community to populate the environment with a new generation of AI bots has added fuel to the current collective vision of a bot-driven customer engagement future.

It also echoes Microsoft’s recent announcements at its Build 2016 event, where the company’s CEO Satya Nadella outlined how he saw AI chatbots as the new ‘apps’ infusing all consumer interactions with intelligence.

Facebook has already been encouraging brands such as KLM and Uber to use its Messenger platform to engage with customers, and the social media firm’s latest initiative looks like accelerating this drive. Mark Zuckerberg’s underlying logic here being that if customers are now spending upwards of 40 minutes a day on Facebook using their smartphones, they might as well be conducting their multiple mobile brand relationships from within the Facebook platform.

All this of course places further pressure on the many brands that are already finding online differentiation challenging in today’s crowded digital world. Will they now have to develop separate AI chatbots to help their customers engage across each of Facebook’s Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s and other bot-driven platforms? And what happens when those initial chatbot-powered sessions transition into true conversational interactions?

Clearly the bots are coming, and it’s important that customer engagement teams understand their impact and get better at reaching out to firms such as Facebook and Microsoft to gain a better understanding of how they need to be working together. Obviously, if AI chatbots can help reduce efforts for customers then that’s great but at what cost to an organisation’s existing multi-million pound Digital Front Door investment?

At Sabio we’re convinced that it’s how organisations evolve their current customer contact strategies to take advantage of this next generation of bot-fuelled interactions that will be critical. However businesses need to be smart about doing this in such a way that they don’t effectively sign away their hard-earned customer relationships to just another external technology vendor. Getting that balance right isn’t going to be easy.