The Slack Bot Era: Connecting Everything SaaS

8 Predictions on the Future of Software Experience w/Bots

Slack makes work more enjoyable. It’s beautiful. Intuitive. Extremely easy to use. And, about to interconnect the SaaS ecosystem & define the future of work. Slack isn’t only a messaging app — it’s a command centre for interacting with nearly anything: services, building experiences through conversations between you and your customers, a search engine to request information, or share, mix, and save intel to relevant channels, and a medium that can provide the foundation for broad A.I. adoption. Slack Bots are personified software — A medium between technology & humans.

Slack bots are the ultimate interface to enable human-like interactions that will fundamentally change the experience between people & software.

The potential of Slack Bots is huge. So, there’s no surprise that Slack has launched an $80M investment fund for its Bot Platform. Why and how will Slack have an impact on the future of business? Here are 8 predictions for the coming era of Slack Bots & how they will connect the SaaS ecosystem.

1. Slack as a Business Operating System

Ben Brown wrote a brilliant piece describing how Slack will act as an operating system for your business. The same way Apple enabled the “app experience” on the iPhone through their iOS, Slack will enable the “message experience” through their interface. Ben Brown describes this as “messaging experience design”. It’ll be the basis for how companies will build Slack Bots using messaging as the experience to connect users to any SaaS service. In other words, you’ll just need to have your desktop Slack application open to access, type commands, request, or interface with Bots that are at your service. Bots are the new App that connect the SaaS ecosystem:

These apps will use Slack as their primary user interface, and thus be available on all platforms, and appear natively as if they were built into Slack, and provide all sorts of features that otherwise might live in a web, desktop or mobile application.

2. A Foundation for Broad A.I. Adoption

Interacting with Slack Bots wouldn’t be much fun if they didn’t have personified characteristics with quirky personalities. The same way Amazon Echo has Alexa as a persona, all Slack Bots will likely have their own, too. In a previous post I talked about the next wave of startups and instead of saying the “Uber of X”, all you need to do is “Just add A.I.”. The rise of A.I. startups and their “Bots” are already happening:

• Claire can book your next business flight while cross checking your company’s travel policy.
• Ensa will provide a personalized wellness recommendation based on your medical records, health, and exercise.
• Cogito will coach you in real time on how to better communicate and read emotional cues on the phone.
• Amy can be your personal assistant and schedule all your meetings.

Now you can see how easy it is to connect the dots between Slack Bots and A.I. personas of Apps that are how you interface with services. The combination of Slack’s rapid growth and the rise of Slack Bots will ultimately drive organic adoption of A.I. services with users barely realizing it. Just have browse through the Bot store and add one to your channel.

3. The Rise of Conversational Marketing

Marketers are about to have a hay day with the new ways of engaging with employees, customers, and prospects through the messaging experience. That’ll naturally lead to someone coining a new marketing term — something along the lines of “Conversational Marketing”. But, since conversations are the basis for any relationship, I think the credit goes to Drift for coining “Relationship Marketing”. Hat tip to David Cancel & Elias Torres.

Conversational & relationship marketing will drive better customer experiences because it’ll make interactions in real time scale. Easier, and more enjoyable to have, too. Sometimes you might be talking to a human, and sometimes a Bot. I don’t think it’ll matter — the personalities of the Bots may be more enjoyable that speaking to real human anyway. That’ll be the power of combining Slack Bots + Channels + A.I. + Messaging Experience.

4. Automation Through Invisible Applications

You probably already have apps running in the background on your phone helping to automate your life. John Meulemans wrote a cool piece on this, “Why an Invisible App Will Be Your New BFF”:

Think of apps that you won’t have to open in order to use them. Apps that talk to you, like magic, through notifications and API’s of your favourite apps like FB Messenger, Slack or even Siri… The biggest advantage… No need to install apps. Just invite a bot into a conversation, text it, cc it or even give a voice-command in order to get things done.

The utility of invisible apps running in the background will be greatest as they help automate tasks. And, not when you tell them, but when they sense you’ll need them and pop up at your service. You won’t need to be technical to direct software to automate tasks — that’s the beauty of the messaging experience and how these apps will be designed and built. It’ll help computers connect to people in ways they do naturally.

5. Slack Era of the Conversational Office

Amir Shevat, Head of Developer Relations at Slack, wrote a post about this — “The Era of the Conversational Office.” It relates back to the previous predictions that messaging will drive conversations, and conversations will drive everything else. The conversational office means it’ll not only be easier to collaborate with remote workers (which has been drastically on the rise), but with software and computerized systems. Amir describes the importance and what this means for the future of work environment:

Why is this so exciting? Why is it so great that we converse with our systems? Why should a computer communicate with us through this chat-based user experience? The answer to that lays in the fact that most current systems provide a sucky (hard and unproductive) user interface. We hate our vacation system because it is hard to navigate, we shy away from our expense system because it is cumbersome, our CRM is a nightmare of checkboxes and data fields we do not understand, our bug and production system is a shrine that only the IT managers and developers can step into.

Spot on. Now everyone can interact with those systems in much more meaningful ways.

6. Continuous Micro Learning in Slack

Let’s be honest… no one enjoys legacy LMS systems and being forced to sit through hour long powerpoint presentations for training. It’s the worst. People don’t learn that way anymore, let alone retain information. The future of learning is continuous and through bite size nuggets that can be consumed when there’s a few minutes to spare. In fact, 80% of learning on the job happens informally — that’s outside of LMS systems, training, and the like. People are continually searching for things online throughout the day. In many cases, these searches to fill knowledge gaps that they have at the moment. For engineers, it could be researching a new technology that they’re adopting.

Slack Bots will bring learning bots to your Slack command centre with invisible apps that can listen, learn, and recommend. (Check out Jeff Mcneill’s post on learning bots for human learning.) It would be the perfect delivery channel for bringing learning to a portal where your team actually spends their time. This would help solve one of the biggest problems with today’s learning systems. The Abhijit Bhaduri, the Chief Learning Officer of Wipro, describes this well in his post “Scaling up Learning”:

Formal opportunities to learn are always rationed and never timely enough simply because learning is never built in to any person’s daily routine.

If “People are the Next Big App”, then Slack Bots could be the missing links to connect appropriate learning experiences to continually keep ourselves “updated” and relevant in the workforce.

FYI… if you’re an engineer and like to share things on Slack, we’re building a Slack Bot for learning over at Outlearn. We’d love to get your feedback in the process. Shoot me an email if you’re interested alex [at] Outlearn.com

7. Channels & Micro Communities

Thanks to Matt Schlicht I just discovered and joined a handful of public slack channels that essentially micro communities. His post “The Top 75 Slack Communities for Entrepreneurs & Developers” is an excellent place to start. There’s no doubt that this trend will continue. At Outlearn, we use private channels for on-boarding and to support customers. It’s pretty easy to see how these private channels could be used for micro communities, invite only groups, your top customers or advocates (Influitive might be fairly worried about this. Not sure why they don’t have an Advocacy Bot yet…). These channels could be the ultimate way to engage your advocates, reward them, and build relationships.

Perhaps the best part about these communities is how you can interact with people where you interact with your colleagues. You don’t have to adopt a new platform, create a new login somewhere, or remember to visit a site to continue a conversation. It’ll all happen right next to this window in my Slack app. Naturally, that reduces a lot of steps and increases my likelihood I’ll join in the conversation.

8. “There’s A Bot for That”

There’s nearly an App for everything on the iPhone… Now, for the coming era of the Bots. What apps did for the phone experience, Slack Bots will do for the work collaboration experience.

Welcome to the Bot Era. A world where invisible apps connect experiences between humans, computers, and artificial intelligence through natural language & communication.

Does your company have a Slack Bot? Reply in the comments with a quick pitch… perhaps we can make an equivalent of a Product Hunt, but for Bots — “Bot Hunt”… type a command for a problem you have and the bot will recommend an appropriate bot to help you.

Share some bot love & hit recommend if you enjoyed ;)

p.s. Slack, I love you.