Why Shopify's Michael Perry is afraid bots will fail small businesses

Earlier this week, Mindtree and Conversable announced plans to work together to automate customer service for businesses. A small business should never automate chatting with customers, said Kit founder Michael Perry, not until natural language processing has made a lot of strides. Perry is founder of Kit, a bot that helps business owners create Facebook ads and promotional material by SMS or chat. One day after news of a Messenger API was shared by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at F8 and Shopify became the first commerce platform to announce an integration with Facebook Messenger, Shopify announced that it had acquired Kit for an undisclosed amount of money. Following the acquisition, Kit is working with 5,000 small businesses and merchants in 76 countries.