Do Chatbots Face the Same Doomed Future as Branded Apps?

BARCELONA, Spain--Chatbots may be all the buzz for brands these days, but some tech execs anticipate it will be tough for brands to create them--much like they struggled to make branded apps. During a panel at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, execs from PayPal, Google, Adobe, Sprint and GupShup talked about how messaging apps are evolving as platforms for content and commerce. While voice technology and artificial intelligence have been big buzzwords in the industry thanks to Facebook's moves to create bots and apps like Kik and Line gaining steam, not all marketers have the resources to realistically create and manage them, argued Harper Reed, PayPal's entrepreneur in residence of next-generation commerce. "Brands don't know how to adapt these things for the technology that we find everyday and I think there's a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand in the West, for instance, to figure out what is their mobile strategy let alone what is their chat app strategy," he said. Harper used his company's own technology to explain marketers' problem.