Better and Bolder in The New Era of Chatbots
Picture this: you get your phone, press a button and ask an AI assistant or chatbot to book a hotel room for your next holiday in Europe. In a few minutes, all is done. Decisions on dates, location, hotel, type of room: check. Payment: check. Confirmation it was done successfully: check. All details added to your Calendar and your partner’s: check.
What’s wrong with the picture above? The removal of the decision making process.
Even when the world was unconnected, human beings had to make thousands of decisions every day. That’s something that consumes a lot of time — and it’s hard. Because when you choose one thing, you’re saying ‘no’ to many others. You’re closing the possibilities. From the most trivial decisions like what time to wake up, through to the most emotional and high-commitment ones like whom to marry, or what house to buy.
Nowadays, decisions based on value (each individual put on what they’re buying) can mess up with the most predictable economic models. Value is based on perception of gratification, which can vary massively between cultures and groups of consumers. On top of that, for many, deciding on the details about your next holiday is the most enjoyable moment of the experience of booking it. No wonder Behavioural Economics has become one of the most exciting research areas in Psychology, Neurology, Marketing, Philosophy and Economics.
I’m a serial entrepreneur in the tech space. I live and breathe technology. Yet, human behaviour and how we change over time is what really fascinates me. Over the last few years, I took massive life leaps as I co-founded a games studio, a 3D printing online platform, and learned hugely from fantastic (paid) executive coaches I worked with along the way. As I hired and managed many people on my journey of building products and companies, I realised something very important: The magical combination of deep self-awareness with doing what you love can move mountains. Our peak performing team members have always shared such traits. Those with the potential to unlock their full capabilities, we happily sponsored a great coach to help them achieve this.
My new venture is totally connected with what fascinates me and the subject of this post: human behaviour, decision making process and change. Our vision is to democratise coaching. (Ok, that’s the investor’s spiel.) What this means to people is: it’s the most accessible and effective tool to achieve self-awareness. BOLDR is more honest than your friends and cheaper than your business & self-improvement books. It’s committed to telling you the absolute truth about yourself. It’s like your mind mirror with magical powers to make you become better and bolder every day.
Its current execution started when a close friend told me about how chatbots would soon eat the world for breakfast. After a moment of disbelief, I decided to go deep into this rabbit role. I talked to developers, AI specialists, academics, psychologists, designers, different groups of consumers, entrepreneurs. I researched everything there is to know about the theme.
The reality is more complex than just the bots’ competencies, though. What’s pushing chatbots to become so in vogue right now (beyond the advancements of AI) is the fact that the App ecosystem is broken. With the sheer amount of apps available out there (and the inability of platforms to devise discoverability algorithms) it’s extremely expensive to get your app to be discovered, to retain users and to monetise them. And before you ask, yes, at Bossa (my games studio) we do invest a lot in Marketing and Community to succeed in this environment and move around its shortcomings.
We need a new model. We need a new way to interact with people and machines. A new way to get us entertained in a much less cumbersome way than finding an app, downloading it, registering, browsing, browsing, browsing, deciding on what to interact with, doing it, paying for it, sharing with friends occasionally.
If you ask me what are the apps/services I know that have started to scratch the surface on it, I’d say the Instant Messaging ones. It’s simple: You go there, you add your friends. Boom! You’re onto the purpose of your visit: chat. No wonder WeChat, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger are in humongous growth momentum. It fulfils the need for people to communicate in the simplest manner possible. With 1 billion users using it, Messenger has become our second home screen, as Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends deck points out.
Given this shift and everything I learned over the last months as I’ve been building BOLDR with an incredible team, it’s pretty clear that chatbots will take off in a big way.
Fellow entrepreneurs, while we make it happen, let’s think about the future we’re creating. Tech is awesome, but humans are much more so. That future I described at the beginning of this post, which could be done by a chatbot, disregards completely how people behave emotionally. We can do better than that. We can create services that are simple, convenient, mobile and will truly help people be better at their lives and purchase choices. But also expand our human capabilities, without killing the fun part of our wonderful moments of exploration of choices and decision making.
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If you’re interested in hearing more about us, chatbots, the tech behind it or our thoughts on the future of coaching, future of conversational UX and human behaviour change, follow me here. You can also sign up HERE to be amongst BOLDR’s first beta testers.
