What We Learned Building Our Own Chatbot

Our annual Innovation Festival--a four-day event this fall with over 200 speakers, and events spanning more than 100 locations across New York City--requires an extreme amount of coordination. The success of the event is contingent on over-communicating with our nearly 6,000 attendees to ensure that they know the where, when, and what of the sessions on their agendas. With all the talk of chatbots and consumer communications moving to messenger platforms, I thought the format could help ensure attendees get answers to logistical questions in real time. To test the idea, we partnered with Work & Co, a digital agency led by designers Joe Stewart and Felipe Memoria, among others, to create the FCNY16 Bot on Facebook Messenger. Marcelo Eduardo, the agency's technology partner, led the charge on our collaboration.