Chatbots were the next big thing in 2016 – so what happened?
Chatbots were not the first marketing technology to be talked up in grandiose terms and then to slump spectacularly. The age-old hype cycle unfolded in familiar fashion, writes Justin JW Lee of HubSpot.
Oh, how the headlines blared: “…the 2016 bot paradigm shift is going to be far more disruptive and interesting than the last decade’s move from Web to mobile apps.”
Chatbots were The Next Big Thing. Our hopes were sky high. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the industry was ripe for a new era of innovation: it was time to start socialising with machines.
And why wouldn’t they be? All the road signs pointed towards insane success. Messaging was huge. Conversational marketing was a sizzling new buzzword. WeChat. China. Plus, it was becoming clear that supply massively exceeded demand when it came to those pesky, hard-to-build apps.
At the Mobile World Congress 2017, chatbots were the main headliners.The conference organisers cited an ‘overwhelming acceptance at the event of the inevitable shift of focus for brands and corporates to chatbots’.
Great analysis of chatbots. I think anyone who suggests that a new technology will replace an old technology is making a very bold prediction – video killed the radio star but it didn’t kill radio.
That said, I think chatbots with very simple use cases could still be really effective – especially as the use of digital assistants grows. People are still only just at the very start of getting used to using them.
I use the ABC News Messenger app every day – it’s a very simple use case, and I find it brilliant for daily news updates and breaking news.