In every industry, there are factors responsible for pushing adoption rates over the tipping point, after which a new trend becomes mainstream. In business communication, two Israeli brothers, Avi and Henri Ben Ezra who founded SnatchBot, can claim substantial credit for helping businesses around the world evolve rapidly to a point where they function successfully thanks to intelligent chatbots. Their platform already served some of the biggest brand in the world including Airbnb, Allianz, iFX by HSBC US and TataCO by Vodafone – and now it has spread the chatbot revolution to smaller businesses by creating a level playing field in the market.
Chatbots are not actually a new phenomenon, yet recently fear and hype took traditional workers by storm: those who were unable to identify career progression routes feared that bots will replace them in the workplace. Even Bill Gates proposed that robots who take human jobs should pay taxes. This comes, as the sudden revolution in chatbot deployment was fuelled by the ability of bots to reach parity with human performance – and even outperform us in some cases. Indeed more recent advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning changed the picture.
It is a fact that businesses now see huge progress in the areas of cost reduction and efficiency. Early adopters have proven to the world that chatbot deployment is the way to go. It has been established, for instance, that in e-commerce, customer service and banking, deploying bots to deliver 24/7 communication services, led to substantial increases in customer retention and acquisition without the need to increase labour costs.
Whilst the costly elements of research were carried by larger businesses, solutions such as SnatchBot came along and literally made technology available to businesses of all sizes. This was done primarily by eliminating barriers to entry such as cost and knowledge.