How Will The Rise Of Bots Influence Brands?

We saw the rise of botnets being employed in politics to influence the opinions of citizens towards candidates, and these bots are used to amplify certain policies, and to marginalize the views of others opposing these policies. Artificial intelligence and the use of bots are being advanced in such a way that citizens aren’t aware that they are interacting with bots, and in doing so, manipulating opinions and elections.

That has had an impact in democratic elections all over the world, and it’s not just isolated to politics. Brands are considering the use of bots to increase sales of their products, to replace human customer service representatives, and to gain insightful feedback from customers. The human factor is being slowly removed from customer service and sales department for these brands.

For now, the use of bots especially chatbots are a heavy lift for brands as many don’t have the ability to effectively manage the operation of chat bots to ensure that they sound like humans in interacting with customers online. However, with constant advances in artificial intelligence being made, brands may reach that point sooner than they think.

In the near future, we may all be interacting with bots via messaging with brands, having our product questions anticipated with ready-made answers, and figuring out technical problems without interacting with a human trained to fix these problems. It’ll be interesting to see if brands choose to use bots or to differentiate themselves by continuing to use humans to exemplify superior customer service.

What do you think? Will brands embrace bots fully, or will some brands choose not to use bots to set themselves apart?