Future of Chatbots: Bots vs Bots

Yesterday I provided my contribute to #WTFuture17 conference organized in Milan by WeAreSocial devoted to explore the future of "Artificial Intelligence & Chat Bots" (https://wearesocial.com/it/blog/2017/01/wtfuture-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-edition-2-febbraio-in-we-are-social)

I enjoyed the very crowded event and specially mixing my point of view with other experiences from WeAreSocial Italy, Wit.ai, Poncho and Vodafone Italia with a glass of beer and good food around :-)

A key question for all of us speakers during the Q&A part was: "Which is the future of chat Bots?"

Ah ah! 1M dollars question, of course!

To answer this I propose the title of my keynote: "Chat bots are the tip of an iceberg in transforming the relation between humans and machines". Machines are augmenting more and more our abilities both at personal as well as at professional levels.

Chat bots are not only an additional interface option with which that consumers could use to interact with brands in a much more fluid and natural way. Rather, chat bots, or perhaps better conversation bots, are the "visible side" of the moon, we see right now.

The other part of the moon, the one we do not see yet, is when our "personal chat bots" will interact with "brand chat bots" to make a deal by themselves, without involving us.

Perhaps, in a while, our "personal chat bots" and "brand chat bots" will talk each other: they will negotiate and activate a pure Artificial-Artificial conversation model.

So, my interpretation of projections as the one from Gartner that says in 2020 85% of interactions with brands will be with artificial entities could be complemented with another similar observation: the majority of such interactions will be not with us, humans, rather with our personal or busines chat bots, so artificial entities will talk each other :-)

In other terms, my "bathroom conversation assistant bot" will negotiate with "toilet paper providers" or "soap providers" or supermarkets and so on chat bots to refurnish my house store.

Fortunately, we do not have eyes to see the future, at least this natural phenomena is preserved by our natural attitude to change whatever is surrounding us ... :-)

The deck I proposed is here, posted on slide share at this link: https://www.slideshare.net/pieroleo/wifuture-conference-artificial-intelligence-and-chatbots-milan

Pietro Leo is an Executive Architect in IBM, CTO for Big Data Analytics and Cognitive Computing in IBM Italy, a well-known Innovation Agitator and Analytics maker. Member of the IBM Academy of Technology Leadership Team (#IBMAoT) and Head of IBM Italy Center of Advanced Studies. You can also follow him on Twitter (@pieroleo)