The Economics Underlying Chatbot Mania

Over the last several weeks, we've reached peak AI/Bot mania. Most of the conversation has centered around Chatbots and the potential emergence of a new platform/distribution layer. If you've been mostly ignoring the press, some good reads are: Tl;dr – the major takeaways are as follows: given that consumers don't really download apps anymore, brands & retailers have a new access point to end consumers, sitting on top of existing messaging platforms and leveraging chatbots to ensure mass scale. The truth is that the chatbot platform conversation is really just an extension of the one we had about a year ago during the emergence of Magic/Operator and SMS as the new platform, which we discussed in Are We Already Rebundling Mobile. An important extension given that such bots have been democratized and can now be spun up not just by tech companies, but by traditional retailers (on their own or within Messenger) or even by individuals such as you and me.