Chatbots in Banking - Silicon Valley Data Science

From asking Amazon Alexa for traffic conditions, to receiving helpful tips from Slackbot, to using WeChat to book doctor's appointments, bots are becoming omnipresent in our lives. The bot market is hot! There's a plethora of companies and investments in bots: VentureBeat's 2016 Bots Landscape shows just under 200 companies ranging from personal assistants to AI tools to messaging, $22B in funding, and a very hefty $159B in valuation. In this post, we explain why chatbots are rising in popularity with banks, the opportunities and challenges chatbots present, and where data and data science fit into the puzzle. Increasingly, banking institutions are using chatbots for "conversational commerce" or "Voice-First Banking"--allowing banks to interact with customers (in real-time if desired) via messaging and digital platforms.