Inc.

Should You Bother With Chatbots?

Hype has been running high for companies to embrace these chatty automatons
STIFF CONVERSATIONALIST A.I.-wired chatbots could be the future of customer service.

TWO YEARS AGO, artificial intelligence upstart AppZen built a smartphone-based personal assistant for employees submitting expenses, hoping to sell it to enterprise customers. “It could understand what employees typed, extract the information it needed, and respond in a conversational way,” says co-founder Anant Kale. It was, in other words, a chatbot—a stripped down software program that can talk to customers through

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