One year later, here's the state of the chatbot economy

That's a question I've been asked a lot lately and one that I'm hoping to get more answers to by attending the second edition of Chatbot Summit in Berlin at the end of the month. Since bot mania took over the tech world nearly a year and a half ago, not a single month has gone by without significant news coming from startups and the usual suspects (i.e. The space has been hyperactive since the beginning, and it doesn't show any sign of slowing down. That said, a lot of brand managers and chief digital officers are still new to the bot world, so I thought it would be handy to go back in time in order to understand where the bot ecosystem stands today. As of mid-2016, more than 11,000 Facebook Messenger bots and 20,000 Kik bots had been launched.