I was involved with AI in the symbolic AI era of the 1980s until the so-called AI Winter. At that point, I went to grad school for a computer science Ph.D. and then had the good fortune to co-found a successful marketing automation software company (with co-founder Anu Shukla) in the 90s. Around 2015, I was on a business trip to Hong Kong when someone pulled me aside and showed me WeChat, which -- in the Chinese-speaking world -- was a replacement for websites, mobile apps, and email marketing. I knew that historically, every time a new customer interaction channel emerged, there was an opportunity for new marketing automation vendors to focus on it. We founded Botco.ai to provide tools for this new conversational marketing channel.

Botco.ai (http://www.botco.ai), the leading HIPAA-compliant conversational marketing solution, is excited to announce that it has been selected as a 2021 TiE50 Winner in the prestigious TiE50 Awards Program. This ten year old awards competition is a program of TiEcon, the world's largest conference for tech entrepreneurs. Botco.ai was recognized for its innovation in using AI technology to drive conversational marketing at scale.

To better handle the influx of inquiries due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona-based American Family Care (AFC) today announced a partnership with Arizona-based Botco.ai to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into AFC's chat channels.