Chatbots are a hot topic right now because they represent such a significant opportunity. Six of the top ten most used apps globally are messaging apps with billions of users, and intelligent, conversational chatbots are the new interfaces for these apps.

An increasing number of people prefer to use messaging apps to contact businesses privately-whether through Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, and others. According to recent SocialBakers research, public posts on Facebook are in decline, and private messages between customers and brands are now five times the volume of wall posts. As a result, over 10,000 companies are developing artificially intelligent chatbots to handle those private conversations.

This is important because the average time it takes for a company to respond to a message is 10 hours (obviously not good!) and the average messaging conversation is 66% longer than the average page conversation. So, done manually, this is a high touch, high cost, high impact area.