Menlo Park, CA — There’s a new kid in town, and every messenger app wants to be their friend. In fact, most of them, including Kik, GroupMe, Twitter, and Slack already have a slight in – but one brand is poised to make a big move.
The new kid is a bot, and Facebook’s throwing the doors to its Messenger platform wide open. Bots are artificial intelligence than can copy human interaction and anticipate user interest, making them a very personalized approach to marketing to and engaging with consumers. Brands will be able to use Messenger as a medium through which they can engage in real-time conversations with consumers, not to mention establish a direct line to check-out. The inspiration is accessibility to products and services without having to download additional applications or adjust to new interfaces. Bots integrate our entire lives into not simply the palms of our hands but a singular messaging application where we can “message a business in the same way [we] would message a friend.”
Why It Matters
It’s all about the consumer experience; we want it all and we want it now. With the growth in popularity of fitness tracking and telemedicine, pharma is slowly catching on to the digital age patient. As bots become an integral part of consumer daily lives and leverage platforms like Messenger to do so, they create the possibility of completely transforming how a brand experience’s interface looks. Maybe they’ll replace the homepage? We’ll see.
