Artificial intelligence and chat bots, the future is now

I recently wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence in the auditing industry and shared my predictions on which industries I expect to adopt AI next. The short answer was: all of them. I also suggested that adoption might be happening sooner that anyone previously thought, thanks to an announcement from Facebook last month. If you followed news from Facebook's F8 developer conference, which took place in April, you might be asking, "What's a chat bot?" It's essentially a computer program designed to simulate conversation with a user, and Facebook generated some buzz around the launch of its bots for Messenger platform, which has already signed on companies like CNN, Salesforce and Staples. But, at its core, a chat bot is also a form of artificial intelligence, and the mainstream adoption of them will in turn drive the mainstream adoption of AI.