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Slack and the Decline of Bots

Remember when bots were the new apps? Now it’s the opposite.

Will Oremus

Published in

OneZero

4 min readOct 22, 2019

A close up of a phone display with various messaging and social media app icons, featuring the Slack app icon in the center. — Photo: Chesnot/Getty

“Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the company’s annual developer conference in 2016. His company had just updated Cortana, its virtual assistant, and built a system for developers to build bots of their own.

The idea was that people would no longer have to open an array of different apps or websites to do things like order lunch or a ride, check the news or weather, or get work done. They could do all of it simply by chatting with artificially intelligent software, which would automatically plug into the services they needed.

Nadella wasn’t the only big bot believer. Three months earlier, the Verge’s Casey Newton had published a long feature on bots as the future of user interfaces. He cited the prevalence of text-based bots in Slack, the workplace productivity app, as well as their proliferation in products like Whatsapp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger.

Fast forward to 2019, and it seems that bots are no longer the new apps. If anything, to judge from Slack’s latest product announcements, apps are the new bots.

“Nobody should have to be a specialist in the dozens of apps they interact with on a daily or weekly…

I do agree that Chatbots for B2C experiences need maturity — we are still far from, for example ordering food straight from our messaging app, reserving a plane and so on.

However, B2B Chatbot integrations are proving themselves to be very useful to…

Yeah, yeah. I’ve been hearing this every 5–10 years for the past 30 years.

Why would I have a 5 min frustrating conversation with a brain dead bot when I can clickety click and finish the same task in less than half the time?

RE: “B2B Chatbot integrations are proving themselves to be very useful to turn web traffic into leads…” And still too annoyingly stupid to be useful (to customers, maybe not to the company) in B2B customer service and problem resolution.