The Sudden Death of the Website

Whether you agree with this or not (and there are plenty of people who disagree), there is a pretty powerful point to be made here. For us, we see the “shortcomings of digital” an organizational. Who should own a company’s digital presence--be it web, mobile, bot? These new media were so disruptive, companies are honestly still just figuring out how to deal with them. To-date, it’s been so departmentalized, siloed. But that results in one of the most staggerings things this author mentions which is “the cost of customer care is three times more than a company’s marketing expenses.” That’s a glaring indicator that there is a dire need for collaboration. Digital is pervasive. It isn’t just an ad campaign here or a call center there, it’s a global communication challenge that touches the entire organization. Our prediction? One of the biggest impacts AI and Bots will have is the merging of Marketing and Customer Care departments.

Sabre Launches 'Ella,' TSI's New Virtual Travel Agent Chatbot

Thrilling to see more bots coming to the travel industry. This article does a great job outlining exactly what a good Bot Pilot structure should look like: Start with a simple use case/tackling your most FAQ. Then observe. The purpose of the pilot isn’t to get everything right, right off the bat, it’s to learn and gather data to improve your bot’s knowledge base and NLP. So structure your pilot with the intention of listening and identifying what people are asking it that you didn’t anticipate. Monitor for drop-off (and optimize accordingly). Be resourceful when it comes to tackling the discovery hurdle. And finally, always, always have a human handoff when things get wonky.

X.ai Brings AI Scheduling on @slackhq

Interesting move by x.ai to go “inside the firewall.” There’s something in us that wants to try it out but, when we think about it, 60% of the time we’ll really only save a tiny bit of time, while the 40% we’ll end up having to fix later on Google Calendar (because I may prefer the morning for that type of meeting, or maybe it’s with Someone in another timezone  and Amy sets the meeting for his 9pm, or because Amy doesn’t want to use a Zoom room so it schedules a weird time but I would have just picked a different conf room, etc). Would we trust her with a client? Ehhh, Mixmax FTW…

With In-Article Chatbots, BBC is Experimenting with New Ways to Introduce Readers to Complex Topics

REALLY interesting new development. We’ve said for a while how disappointed we were with publishers’ first forays into bots--basically just glorified RSS feeds in a chat bubble. We knew the future of Media in bots would be curation, and it seems that’s finally taking shape. The BBC is not only making bots that help readers dive deeper into complicated topics covered in their articles--they’re actually building the platform to make it stupid simple for journalists everywhere to quickly add bots to any of their articles. Coooool!