A Three Wish Listicle for Intelligent Assistance in 2017

Tis the season for Listicles – those wonderfully quick reads with the "Top 10" things to look for in the coming year. Customers started showing a pronounced preference for self-service over lengthy interactions with live assistants. Conversational commerce, involving chatbots through mobile devices was rapidly expanding All flavors of Intelligent Assistants (especially bots and virtual agents) were making the transition from "assistant" to "advisor" Customers started showing a pronounced preference for self-service over lengthy interactions with live assistants. All flavors of Intelligent Assistants (especially bots and virtual agents) were making the transition from "assistant" to "advisor" Indeed, these three factors shaped IA in 2016 and will continue to do so in 2017, spurred on by increased spending by business enterprises on Speech Processing, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Knowledge Management and Predictive Interaction Analytics. It's great news for the 28 or so firms that offer platforms for Enterprise Intelligent Assistants [link to our Landscape] while, at the same time it is a tremendous shot in the arm for the thousands of developers who are building bots for messaging platforms (especially Facebook Messenger) or "skills" for "metabots" (like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant).