One of my favorite movies is “Her” where the main character forms a romantic relationship with his operating system. Imagine Scarlett Johansen’s voice an assistant bot like Siri, Alexa or Cortana.
While I am not yet ready to date my assistant (besides, I am married!), these artificial intelligence (AI) bots are the new interface to all technology. Most people want to ask computers questions in natural English without having to worry about fitting their query in a format the technology can understand. For example, wouldn’t it be great to chat to your online assistant “what we’re our company sales this month” or “how much money did we make?” What about right before the start of a customer appointment you could ask “how much business did XYZ company do with us last year?”
Now you almost can. Sage and Gupshup introduced a new chat bot for small business called Pegg and she’s much easier to use than an app. This bot is great for tracking travel expenses when they are incurred instead of ending up with a box of receipts at the end of the trip. The purpose of Pegg is to help small business owners understand their finances better which is a huge problem. “Over 65 percent of small businesses continue to largely rely on spreadsheets and manual record keeping practices that are not only inaccurate and time consuming, but also incredibly tedious and costly to maintain,” said Kriti Sharma, Global Director of Mobile Product Management at Sage.
Simply interact with Pegg through text chats on Facebook Messenger or Slack. Microsoft has also introduced a number of useful bots. AI bots are the future team members of your business. It’s time to meet them.
