The guy who coined the term “conversational commerce” was wrong about conversational commerce
BTW, I’m the guy that coined the term
In January of 2016, I declared that it would be the year of “conversational commerce” — a new paradigm in which automated assistants and bots in voice and messaging channels would radically alter how people use computers! Data from that year that showed a migration to one-to-one messaging from one-to-many, passively consumed social feeds has just been reinforced in the 2018 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. With this shift, a new front has opened in the battle to dominate distribution through conventional app stores thanks to conversational interfaces like voice assistants and bots.
To seize on this moment, most of the biggest tech companies opened up APIs to help businesses and brands connect with their customers over messaging and voice contexts, and a flurry of experimentation ensued — much of which quietly persists today. Armed with sequential chat-bubble form inputs delivered by bots addled with a dusting of NLP and backed up with a phalanx of humans-in-the-loop, brands, businesses and developers have explored a wide range of approaches to capitalize on these new channels.
