Why chatbots are so disruptive

Chatbots have been around for decades. There are 18,000 of them on Facebook Messenger alone, with over 1,000 chatting away on Kik in the past six months. Slack has deployed countless bots to help humans get work done in groups since 2013. We've seen a critical mass for the first time, but -- as with any disruptive tech -- there are stages. This first generation of chatbots were derived from common programming languages.