Paul Bravmann

Other platform builders are currying favor with developers and capitalizing on the enterprise segment of the market. Intercom and Smooch enable brands and companies to message their customers from within their existing apps. Twilio and Layer offer more fundamental components that can be composed into increasingly sophisticated offerings.

Additionally, conversational mobile apps have a lot more contextual information about users, including location, health, sensor, and social data. This information is useful for fighting fraud, and as such conversational apps (like Operator) will push commerce and purchases into this context aggressively and away from the query-thrashing model (read: Google).

Meanwhile, all of this data is also available to clever developers to build interesting and more personal agents and bots. And since each interaction and engagement is tracked, the longer the conversation thread persists, the easier it will be to offer more responsive heuristic approaches that anticipate the user’s specific needs. That is, the more conversational agents will appear to be getting to know you!