At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September 2016, Facebook’s VP of messaging products, David Marcus, admitted that chatbots got “overhyped very quickly.” And around the same time, something else very quickly changed: Chatbot pessimism became en vogue.
The sudden change of opinion, like the original hype, is classic groupthink in action, moving with the tides. Don’t get me wrong, I agree chatbots have been overhyped. But that only means that our expectations have been wrong. There are significant possibilities for chatbots today, if we focus on the right problems.
