Could Chat Bots Replace Human Jobs?

The hype around chat bots has been building since the start of this year, and amplified further when Facebook announced Messenger would be hosting more of them in the coming year.

Mark Zuckerberg’s grand plan is to help businesses build bots on his chat app, so they can hold automated chats with people that eventually lead to bookings, sales and greater brand awareness.

Many businesses have since been hiring software makers to help keep up with the trend by creating bots. “It’s the gah-i-need-an-app-craze again for so many companies right now,” says Peder Fjallstrom, a developer in Sweden whose app development company just created a bot agency. “Everyone wants a bot. No one knows why.”

Bots are cheaper and quicker to make than apps, and gaining prominence at a time when new apps are struggling to get downloads in a maturing market. It’s why many in tech are saying that bots are poised to take over from apps.

But is it only apps at risk of obsolescence?

Many of the bots that have either hit the market or are getting ready to launch, carry out tasks traditionally done by humans. Here’s a few jobs that are already being augmented (or challenged, depending on your point of view) by bots:

Customer Service Agents

When you open Facebook Messenger in the coming months, it’ll eventually be possible to communicate with brands and companies through chat. The first businesses on Messenger have employed humans to man their accounts. E-commerce firm Everlane has one or two reps fielding around 200 enquiries on Messenger each day.

Dutch airline KLM’s account on Messenger is also manned by humans. But Facebook’s pitch to businesses is that over time they can use its bot engine and expertise in artificial intelligence to automate those customer conversations with bots, saving them money they might otherwise spend on human agents. “We are looking at technical possibilities AI might offer,” a KLM spokesman said, adding that the airline is looking at blending answers from human customer service agents and automated bots.

Everlane and Zulily, another early business on Messenger, declined to comment.

Fast-food Servers

The chat app Kik is currently in talks with some of America’s biggest fast-food chains about hosting food-ordering bots on its app, which is popular with teenagers. The premise is that when a Kik user walks into a McDonalds and sees a “Kik code” (like a QR code) on the wall, they can scan it with their phone to get the McDonald’s bot going on Kik. They won't really chat to the bot in the traditional sense, but tap keywords like “Diet Pepsi” or “Big Mac” that appear in the chat box, and then pay for their meal using card details they already stored on the app. Facebook has also launched its own Messenger Codes which could be used in the same way as Kik’s.

McDonalds already has kiosks at the front of some of their outlets which takes the strain off servers at the till, but these kiosks can cost as much as $100,000 each, according to a spokesman at Kik, while bots as a fraction of that cost.

Personal Assistants

New York-based startup x.ai has developed a personal assistant bot called Amy that will schedule calendar appointments for you if you copy her into your e-mails to other people. She will, quite literally, send a note to the recipient on your behalf, suggesting times and dates for a meeting and will even reschedule for you if the person writes back to her to cancel.

"We’ll certainly be massively in market in 2016," says Dennis Mortensen, who founded x.ai. Mortensen isn't pitching Amy as a replacement to real-life personal assistants, but rather as a cheap alternative for regular folks who wouldn't dream of hiring a PA because they can't afford one. If the current, new generation of office workers end up using clients like Amy to help set up events in their calendars, though, they could also get comfortable enough with the technology (which will also improve over time) to choose not to hire PAs when they finally get to the point in their careers when they might be able to afford one.

Amy, which essentially exists as an email address, could one day be setting up meetings with other Amy's, Mortensen postulates. "You go from asynchronous to instant scheduling," he says. "There’s no pain in your end and no pain on her end."

Social Media Manager

This is a speculative one, but organizations and celebrities who pay people to man their Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts, could soon rely on bots as the new creative engines for interesting things to post. One bot developer suggested to me that bots could present a series of possible statements to say on Twitter, for instance, leaving human social media agents to simply choose which was best.

Microsoft’s chatbot Tay recently had a public relations crisis on Twitter because when let loose, it quickly began spewing racist remarks. When there's a large audience to broadcast too, bots might do better in the background doing the grunt work.

Taking this a step further, bots could become fanciful proxies for celebrities who chat to fans on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Kik. Some developers have already been experimenting with this.

A bot for the One Direction singer Harry Styles recently did the rounds on Kik Messenger and chatted to 90,000 of its users, of whom around 10-15% thought it was the real Styles, according to a spokesperson for WattPad, the writing community site that made the bot.

Harry-bot seemingly came to life on a whim. Two staffers from WattPad's growth team and social media teams built the bot on a one-day hack project in February, partly because Styles was so popular among some of Wattpad's staff. Their bot is now having thousands of conversations with teens on Kik each day, according to Ivan Yuen, Wattpad's co-founder, and driving more traffic to Harry Styles fan-fiction on Wattpad (which is quite another world in itself).

"We see users go back and talk with the bot on a daily basis," he says, adding that he's not sure if the real Harry Styles knows about it.

The way fans interact with celebrities is changing, says Eval Pfeifel, co-founder of the Israeli startup Imperson which creates bots for popular characters like Miss Piggy to chat with users on Facebook Messenger. "I’m sure that in the future we will probably do actual celebrities." Pfeifel has already tried simulating a few famous actors with bots and found his test group enjoyed talking to them. "Fans don't want to suspend their belief. They want to believe it's a real person."

A long way out

If bots are going to replace any positions of employment it won't happen any time soon, even in areas like remote customer service, where Facebook is encouraging businesses to use bots.

For some historical perspective: many people thought the traditional call centre was dead back when the Internet started to become mainstream, says Mayur Anadkat, vice president of product marketing for contact-centre software maker Five9. “But data shows that more calls come into call centers than ever before.”

Anadkat believes that businesses will continue to hire people to deal with telephone calls in addition to building an army of bots on Messenger, Kik or WhatsApp to get other questions answered.

It's not a question of replacing, but augmenting, agrees Raj Koneru, CEO of Kore, an enterprise platform for bots that talk to users of software from Salesforce or SAP. "At the end of the day when it gets complicated and you need assistance from a human being, you’ll go to a customer service representative anyway."

Koneru believes bots will find just as much use helping employees get their jobs done as they will interacting with customers.

"Several functions are going to get a lot more efficient," he says. "Marketing, IP functions particularly related to infrastructure management, human resources functions like on-boarding of employees. The number of steps that need to be done to get a task completed, chatbots will enable people to do them faster and better."

If some jobs become less relevant, money will be spent to create new jobs elsewhere, he argues. "That may result in a reduction of workforce in some companies, but many will take advantage of the productivity gains and increase their research and development spend."

For now developers are counting on getting people to talk to their bots at all on platforms like Facebook and Kik. Once they start to see the kind of engagement you'd find between two human beings, then it might be a matter of moving and redefining traditional jobs rather than replacing them altogether.