“What’s the state of the global chatbot economy today?”
That’s a question that I’ve been asked a lot lately, and one that I’m hoping to get more answers to by attending the second edition of Chatbot Summit in Berlin at the end of the month. Since bot mania took over the tech world nearly a year and a half ago, not a single month has gone by without significant news coming from both startups and the usual suspects (i.
e. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.). Needless to say the space has been hyperactive since the beginning, and it doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.That said, a lot of brand managers and chief digital officers are still new to the bot world. As such, I thought it would be handy to go back in time and take a snapshot of where the bot ecosystem stands today.
By the numbers
As of mid-2016, more than 11,000 Facebook Messenger bots and 20,000 Kik bots had been launched. Over the last year, you could’ve shopped New York Fashion Week pieces from the Burberry bot, asked the Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte bot its favorite book, or sent emojis to the British Airways bot to get vacation recommendations. Fast forward to this stat from April 2017: 100,000 bots were created for Messenger alone in the first year of the Messenger platform.
VCs have started paying attention to chatbots too. In the first six months of 2016 alone, $58M was invested in chatbots and 29 new bot startups were founded. Slack launched an $80M fund last year to invest specifically in bots running on its platform. There is, in fact, even a website that tracks all of the chatbot financings as they happen.
Race between the tech giants
For the past few years, the industry giants have been competing for the top spot in the race to build the best chatbot and the best bot platform.
“Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in March 2016, setting off the chatbot revolution. But the company took to the movement with a bit of a rocky start last year. An AI chatbot made for Twitter, Tay got taken down about 24 hours after its launch when its tweets became racist and hate-filled. After that, Microsoft launched Zo, a bot for Kik ,…
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