The 5 branches of conversational commerce: A guide to the bot world

It's hard to make a right turn down San Francisco's crowded streets these days without running into a story about bots, conversational commerce, or conversational commerce bots. Bots have reached kale levels of hype. But amidst the noise, there's something real going on here -- we just have to decipher it. You may have heard of conversational commerce -- it's a catchall term for a future of technology driven by messaging (and voice) interactions that transcend current communications modalities. It's a convenient moniker but also confusing because there isn't one trend to follow.