Context is the only thing that can save chatbots

Although it's easy to get distracted by the messaging app horse race or the latest advances in AI and natural language processing, what makes modern messaging so powerful isn't the technology -- it's the people at the center of it. The next time you see a teenager immersed in her smartphone during a family meal, think about whether she's being captivated by the quality of the user interface or Snapchat filter or by the immediacy and intimacy of the conversation. And if you picked up her phone and looked at her messages and Snaps would you be able to make sense of them without knowing the people she was interacting with and understanding the complexities of her relationships? And that goes for all of us. As the humans responsible for building the customer experience of the future, we need to stop thinking about conversations as a stream of data and start focusing on the people at the center of those conversations.