The Robot-Powered Internet

Why 62% of companies will be using AI technologies by 2018

In Feb of 2016, Forbes interviewed Kik CEO regarding the emergence of bots and what the future is sure to look like. In the process, they discussed many things, such as potential use cases for bots and how bots will one day fit into our everyday lives.

Imagine ordering food using chat apps from one of the classier restaurants. How about using among one of the popular chat apps, scan code from restaurants and new conversation pop-ups in the App,

“Welcome to the ABC Kitchen! What can I get you? Suggested answers hover over my keyboards, and you tap “Order Pizza.”

It writes back: “Please type your Pizza order below.” “The Classic slice and Diet Coke,” you type, dropping the pleasantries you’d usually use with a human server:

Minutes later a waitress comes by, and instead of asking what you want puts down a delicious slice of pizza and a tall, dark glass of fix and ice. Isn’t it feel like the first time you tapped a button, and Uber car appeared a few minutes later- the magic of what many in the tech industry call online-to-offline, the ability of physical order services from an app. Except now you don’t even need a new App- you can just chat your way to a richer life.

The golden era of apps is already over. As per the Forbes article published in Feb 2016, American has been downloading zero of them per month on average. Most of us have all the apps we need and have narrowed our use down to a few messaging and social networking services. So, instead of wasting thousands of dollars pushing an app on an unwilling public, B2B, B2C are taking their business to services such as Kik, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp that their customer is already using to text.

In China, millions of business already take payments and advertise through so-called official accounts on WeChat, or Weixing in Mandarin, the country’s biggest messaging app, with ~650 million active monthly users. WeChat may have grossed as much as $3.8 billion last year, most of it from selling games and videos ads on official accounts, but translation fee will likely to take up a bigger portion as more business sell goods and services through the app.