AiThority Interview with Chris Maeda, Co-Founder & CTO, Botco.ai

I was involved with AI in the symbolic AI era of the 1980s until the so-called AI Winter. At that point, I went to grad school for a computer science Ph.D. and then had the good fortune to co-found a successful marketing automation software company (with co-founder Anu Shukla) in the 90s. Around 2015, I was on a business trip to Hong Kong when someone pulled me aside and showed me WeChat, which -- in the Chinese-speaking world -- was a replacement for websites, mobile apps, and email marketing. I knew that historically, every time a new customer interaction channel emerged, there was an opportunity for new marketing automation vendors to focus on it. We founded Botco.ai to provide tools for this new conversational marketing channel.