How Small Businesses Are Using AI Chatbots in 2017

Artificially intelligent chatbots aren't just for Fortune 500 companies anymore. Thanks to a slew of innovative bot ventures that focus on the user experience, small business owners are now using AI technology to improve daily operations, connect with clients and increase sales. Heavy hitters like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella have publicly touted the value of AI chatbot technology, and with Google investing in Allo, Facebook's launch of Messenger, Windows' rollout of Cortana, and the early success of Operator and Telegram, it's reasonable to assume that AI chatbots are going to be ubiquitous.
Here's how early adopters in the small business category are currently engaging with AI chatbot technology through subscription services, custom builds, free services and beta testing.

1. Conversational Commerce

A relatively new term coined by Chris Messina in 2015, conversational commerce is the latest buzzword surrounding AI chatbot technology. At its core, conversational commerce is exactly what it sounds like: purchasing an item within the context of a conversation with a chatbot. By creating a dialogue with a program that learns, stores information and changes, customers can purchase items with fewer steps than ever before. Some tech leaders even believe that conversational commerce will eventually replace all other modes of online shopping.

Chatfuel, a California-based company that builds custom bots, allows small business owners to create Facebook-ready chatbots in minutes without any technical expertise. Luca Friedrich, the Head of User Happiness at Chatfuel, wrote, "Lately, we see more and more small businesses adding Payments to their bots; it enables people to order a product directly in their Messenger app. I believe that this will become a lot more popular, as it is a great opportunity for business owners to make more revenue without having to buy a website or have someone build an online store for them."
What Friedrich is describing is the core of conversational commerce, and small business owners (especially those selling a consumer product or service) are already benefiting.

2. Customer Service

Chatbots are also gaining serious visibility in the customer service realm. Many small businesses are investing in custom AI chatbots to interact with customers, answer FAQs and even process payments. Rather than spending the time and money to respond individually to every inquiry, savvy business owners are streamlining the process with friendly bots that act as the first line of communication with customers.
Online tools such as Converse and Zendesk are popular among small business owners who want to create custom chatbots without coding and then integrate them across a variety of platforms. Businesses as varied as real estate offices, retail shops, health care centers, law offices, spas and consulting firms are already using these types of bots to interact with customers and provide fast hands-off service.

3. Personal Assistance

One of the simplest and most affordable ways small business owners are harnessing AI technology is by using personal assistant tools. Instead of accessing lots of different apps for secretarial tasks like making hotel reservations and ordering office supplies, you can now text a friendly AI assistant instead. Niki.ai is a personal concierge bot that can do everything from scheduling your laundry pickup to ordering you dinner, Pana is a smart bot that books travel accommodations through seamless conversations, and the popular x.ai bot has become a go-to for small business owners who don't want to schedule their own meetings anymore.
According to Dennis R. Mortensen, the CEO and founder of x.ai, taking just one task, like scheduling meetings, off the plate of busy entrepreneurs has a considerable cumulative effect.
"Our data shows that scheduling a single meeting takes about 17 minutes on average," he said. "Think about that for a second. If you're a small business owner, and you schedule eight meetings a week, you're wasting over two hours per week and nearly 10 hours a month scheduling your own meetings."
Part of x.ai's appeal, in addition to the time-saving element, is that it doesn't require an additional app or interface. All users have to do is cc Amy Ingram (or the bot's brother Andrew) on emails about meetings and the bot will automatically finish the task of scheduling and confirming for you.

4. Conversational Advertising 

In the world of AI chatbots, conversational advertising is closely but not inextricably linked to conversational commerce. Advertising via direct messaging has more to do with increasing a business's visibility than processing orders, and it might not necessarily include a direct point of purchase within the conversation. Many small businesses now use advertising-focused chatbots to spread the word about special promotions, sales and discount codes, but the bots can also be used to raise visibility within a region or increase repeat patronage.
While conversational advertising hasn't taken the place of direct email marketing campaigns or comprehensive websites quite yet, it's still a great avenue for small business owners to diversify their marketing efforts. Messenger already allows users to sign up for updates from businesses they like, including small local businesses, so it might just be a matter of time before it becomes de rigueur to get appointment reminders from your dentist or tax accountant on a chat platform.

5. Intelligence and Analytics

Data gathering isn't the most obvious use for AI chatbots, but it's certainly a nice side effect of them. The AI aspect of many chatbots not only makes them easier for clients to use but better for small businesses as well. Most chatbots that are intended for customer interaction have a back end that collects and analyzes data, and companies such as Chatfuel provide their users with easy access to the analytics.
Each bot that Chatfuel builds keeps track of the general categories customers use, which means business owners can gradually tailor their individual bots to meet their clients' needs. As AI technology improves and chatbots become more sophisticated, the power of the analytics behind them will grow, making them a fantastic resource for businesses at every stage of growth.
The AI chatbot wave is just beginning, but it's already changing the way people interact with the internet and the way small businesses interact with their customers.

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Bot-to-bot marketing is coming soon. Are you ready?

Martech's future isn't only about bots and agents talking to consumers. Here's what it means when they start talking to other bots and agents.

Amazon Echo, housing the Alexa intelligent agent

In the past year or so, a new marketing channel has emerged around bots and intelligent agents.
This includes voice-based intelligent agents like Google Home’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, and chatbots that interact largely through text conversations. Marketers are beginning to plan their conversational strategies and logic for this channel.
But another channel — maybe it should be considered a sub-channel — is about to emerge. It’s when the bot or agent, fulfilling the needs of the human user, is interacting with another bot or agent instead of searching the web, or a knowledge base, or a profile.
Just when you thought digital marketing strategy had reached its stasis, we may be in for another major reinvention.
In a few years, ArcTouch Chief Experience Officer and founder Adam Fingerman predicted, “most interaction will be conversational.” His company develops apps — and now bots — and he’s conducting a session on “Bot-to-Bot Marketing” at our MarTech Conference in May.
In a common scenario today, you might ask Google Home to find a hotel room under $450 in Chicago near the Loop.
Google Home searches the web, possibly including reviews on TripAdvisor.
To support this user-to-agent/bot interaction, Fingerman told me, “marketers will have to spend more time on reputation management” to ensure that what Google finds is generally good. Hopefully, that will translate into being one of the top results, since a voice-based agent is likely to return only a few.
He also suggested brands may need to provide more structured data — possibly in a specific industry-based taxonomy — that makes attributes more transparent so Google Home can do apples-to-apples comparisons about, say, hotel rooms.

The importance of loyalty

Another tilting factor can be loyalty points, which Fingerman said will become more important since you may direct Google Home to Hilton, where you’re a loyalty program member.
Eventually, Hilton will want to become more of an active player in this new kind of user interaction. It might pay for top placement when “find me a hotel in Chicago” comes up in a search by an agent or bot.
So far, these are fairly standard marketing tools — reputation management, positioning, loyalty programs, paid placement — in response to what is essentially a voice-controlled intelligent search engine.
But this can change when the bot/agent acts on your preferences, either stated by you or learned over time from the decisions you make.
That’s because the natural evolution of this preferences-based activity by a generalized bot/agent is a personal bot or agent that acts only on your behalf. Perhaps it can search for anything, or perhaps it specializes in hotel rooms. In that case, you might also have bots/agents for finding a great restaurant, or getting the best concert tickets, or whatever.
Analyst David Raab pointed out to me that, when you are represented by a personal agent/bot, “brands will have to speak to your preferences.”
But those aren’t necessarily the same kinds of preferences that, say, guide the personalization of web content when you visit a particular publisher’s site. Or that cause Netflix to show you more thrillers, because you watch so many of that movie genre.
It’s not yet clear exactly how your personal bots will express your preferences, except in their selection of products to recommend to you. Perhaps a preferences profile will be available from the bot.

Bot competition

At the very least, this means marketers’ systems will need to track what your bot(s) chooses, in addition to what you choose. This can lead to new kinds of targeting segmentation, where advertising or marketing systems are segmenting and targeting not just you, but your bots.
And it could be more complex than that, because it may not be entirely clear the extent to which your personal bot actually represents the entirety of your preferences.
As Raab told me via email:

Consumer-side bots will need to be trained. A bot might just listen to you order pizza a few times to get some idea of how you do it, and then take over, perhaps asking for coaching during future interactions if it’s not sure what you want. People will vary in how much control they’re willing to delegate, and those preferences might change from one day to the next.

You might have personal bots with different authorities to represent your different interests, just as you might have a separate real estate lawyer, a divorce lawyer and a tax lawyer. Or you might have a bot with a deeper understanding of what you like in shoes, compared to another one that only finds slippers for you.
For one thing, Raab noted, this could lead to a “competition among consumer-side bots,” where independent providers — incentivized by a percentage of sales — offer personal bots with differing intelligence levels or industry specialties.
Beyond the generalized intelligent agents/bots, and the personal agents/bots, it’s quite possible brands may develop their own. (Agents/bots might overlap with platform-specific applications like Amazon’s skills, which some brands have developed, but agents/bots can offer platform-independence and act as a general brand interface.)
Hilton’s bot might know how to match the attributes sought, how to offer the right kind of incentives, or even how to negotiate.
Brand bots “will need rules for how to interact with [either] people or bots,” Fingerman noted. Rules that don’t yet exist, and which may eventually have to conform with some middleware provided by Google, Amazon, Apple or others.

‘Digital Cohesion’

Inherent in all of this, both Raab and Fingerman point out, is a new incarnation of trust. It might simply be another form of brand trust — i.e., I trust Amazon and therefore I trust Alexa.
Or it might be earned trust, where you learn to trust a personal bot provided by a third party because it returns good choices, the way you might learn to trust Pandora’s taste in how it programs a thematic radio station.
Raab pointed out that all of this belongs to a broader vision of autonomous technology acting on our behalf, described as “Digital Cohesion” by network solution provider Juniper Networks.
In a white paper on the topic, the company broadly defines the term as:… a future in which applications connect and self-assemble to deliver compelling mega-services that enhance our lives.”
In one implementation, for instance, a system-wide intelligence monitors a diabetic man’s medical sensors and knows when to intervene and what services to call.
Implied in this vision, of course, is that bots and agents are talking to bots and agents.
So, it’s not just about finding the best nearby pizza. It could be almost every kind of consumer, health or business choice will be mediated by intelligent bots/agents, probably layers of them. Marketers are just beginning to get a sense of that emerging ecosystem.
And you thought the digital universe was settling down.


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