The old school rule-based chatbots often gave a frustrating experience with their rigid conversation structure. These chatbots often don't register previous user interactions as they are powered by simple Machine Learning Technology called pattern making. The rule-based chatbots are trained to answer questions that are fed i.e. meaning you must ask questions with an exact word match that the chatbot is trained with. This is a thing of the past with new generation chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence and NLP technologies. Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence have progressed to a point where talking to a bot feels as natural as speaking to another person.

When customers reach out to the company for service, they expect instant responses to their problems. However, a customer care provider can only cater to a certain number of cases at a time. How do you scale support? Have you thought about the customers? There are so many service horror sagas that customers have experienced like long wait lines where the agent is unavailable, one where the agent is unable to deliver answers to customer's questions, agents ghosting on a customer on call, and inconsistent answers provided by service agents.

Furthermore, in order to get their job done and fulfill their commitments, a typical employee must interact with multiple applications, each with its own learning curve. While enterprise apps make sense for tasks that are performed frequently or on a regular basis (like submitting your weekly time sheet or approving expenses), the valuable real estate they occupy on the already cluttered home screen makes less sense for the long-tail of tasks that are accessed less frequently. They have access to all the corporate information needed to get the job done and can perform complex tasks across multiple systems. Because bots rely on natural language processing (NLP) -- the ability of humans to interact with computers using free-form language -- workbots can help an employee get to the starting point quickly and without any training, in the same way a search engine would, and then help guide the user through the task in a step-by-step fashion.

Artificial intelligence, which uses algorithms and rules-based logic to automate a wide variety of tasks within many verticals, is hot. It occupies the top spot in 2017 tech trend lists from such notable companies as Ericsson and Gartner. Cognitive systems and AI adoption across a broad range of industries are likely to drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, according to IDC. Automated customer service agents is one of the key AI areas that attracted investment last year, the research firm noted. "From better purchase recommendations, to smarter customer service that predicts what a consumer is actually trying to do, AI promises to fundamentally transform entire businesses and industries," said Scott Horn, CMO at customer engagement solution provider [24]7.

Our VP of Business Development, Markus Zirn, discusses two of the biggest trends in tech – Slack and AI – and how Workato brings them together to create the future of work. According to the latest okta survey, Slack is the #1 fastest cloud application in enterprises with a 77% growth rate. Slack enables team communication by providing chat rooms, organized by themes, as well as offer private messaging and private group messages. In May 2016, it counted 3M daily active users. There's no question that Slack has become nothing short of a movement to bring team communication to the 21st century.