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Last year, we asked if the future of customer service was artificial intelligence, but this year there was no doubt. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very broad term, applying to everything from machine learning to driverless cars and the Siri application in iPhones. The term is relative to its time

It’s never too early to prepare. Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and other holidays may ensure your brand’s success in 2016, but why not plan ahead for 2017? To sustain your success not just now but in the future, you need to understand upcoming trends in order to act

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple’s iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The “app economy” has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users’ news

We are now in a social media dominated world, and marketers and businesses are taking full advantage of it. However, this means that trends and the way brands should best communicate with their customers are constantly changing. Brands need to ensure they keep up with the latest trends to ensure

Shares 34Back in April 2016, an announcement was made by Facebook inviting third parties to use the Facebook Messenger platform to host their own chatbots. Since then, you may have noticed the option to communicate with bots through your Facebook messenger app. When tapping the ‘Search’ bar, you’ll now see

While we think of them as the latest thing in tech, conversational interfaces have been around for quite some time. From Cleverbot and Smarter Child to labyrinthine phone trees (“say REPRESENTATIVE”), we have been trying to build technology that mimics how we interact with humans for years. Recent advances in

Salesforce on Tuesday released LiveMessage, a chatbot that lets enterprises users engage customers through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, SMS or MMS directly within its Service Cloud. Service agents can respond to customers on Facebook Messenger after accessing their records, for example, and the conversation automatically is appended and

In an industry known for its love of buzzwords and hype, artificial intelligence (AI) has become marketing’s new ‘big data’. But where big data ultimately led to new layers of complexity, AI promises the opposite. Big data forced marketers to become data scientists (or hire them, if they could be

Artificial intelligence (AI) has officially gone mainstream. Industry research firm Gartner named AI as its number one strategic technology for a second year in a row. The acquisitions race among giants like Google, IBM, Salesforce and Apple to purchase private AI companies keeps heating up — 2016 alone saw 40 AI-related acquisitions and

The global shift towards automation (and the resulting impact on jobs in the U.S.) became a hot-button issue during 2016’s political season. But whether you’re red, blue, or somewhere in between, you can’t argue with statistics that show that many segments of our economy are moving towards automated work: The

Take a step back for a look at the big picture and it’s clear that 2016 was a remarkable year for bots and virtual assistants. Within the span of a few months this spring, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft all made plans to grow bot ecosystems and invited developers to build

Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI’s time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. Instagram Rolls Out Live Video to All U.S. Users: Following an announcement a few weeks ago, Instagram is rolling out

Retailers investing in new technologies during 2016 did so in many cases to keep up with the competition, often represented most specifically by Amazon — the company that influenced how many of them pursued e-commerce, and now is prompting them to consider innovations in the emerging area of conversational commerce.

VentureBeat’s Bots Channel tracks the most important news and analysis from the exploding field of bots and messaging. Each week, we select the top stories and present them in our free weekly newsletter, BotBeat. We include news stories by VentureBeat staff, guest articles from leading figures in the bots community, and a good number of posts