We all knew Google bot or Bing bot, now let me introduce you to Jarvis, Pepper bot and Ira. All of these and much more are going to be next Xerox for photocopy and Nirma for washing powder. Yes, the bots are coming, no no, they have arrived.

Bots or robots in lay man terms are programs which are designed and powered by artificial intelligence which help converse with humans through various ways.

The bots in various formats are causing disruption in how the brands are interacting with their consumers. So what can the bots do for your brand? Let’s see –

Removing redundancy: Bots, generally have a standard way of responding and are very static in their conversation styles. Hence, bots can replace the at least 15% of the calls to the customer care helpdesk, which generally land for routine inquiries.

The media giant CNN on their Facebook page has integrated a messenger bot, which helps the users subscribe for news or choose which news they will read.

Intelligent integration: Integration with various social media platforms can help the brands with a lot of intelligent demographical data about its customers – which can be a huge input for the next phase of product planning.

Most significant and interesting integration of bots which I have come across in the recent time is by ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank. Their tweet to send the money or pockets as a product has got some interesting and intelligent integration of technology and social media.

Learning and improving: Most of the bot technology is based on Natural Language Processing, which means it is both easy to teach the bot about the new things and also easy for the bot to teach/inform the user about new things based on the inputs.

Not an Indian brand, but JPark Island Resort & Waterpark in Cebu has very successfully embedded NLP based bots in a very nascent form though.

Virtual Reality: With the augmentation of virtual reality apps and various easy and cost effective ways to connect create and curate content, the integration of bots with a VR device can create an awesome experience for the consumers.

While there are many brands globally experimenting various solutions and products in this space, there is not really A particular brand that can be spoken about. However, the future looks very interesting in this space.

Back home, with brands embracing bots by incorporating it with various messaging apps I can clearly see that it has already found a place in the digital strategy of the companies. Various researchers’ across the globe have touted the Bot industry to be around USD 200 billion and poised to grow exponentially, it is time to formulate a ‘Bot strategy’ and say What the Bot!