Every year in March the tech world descends upon our humble little hometown here in Austin for SXSW. The conference, and corresponding festival, is undoubtedly one of the tentpole events for the tech industry, one in which agendas are set, trends are initiated, and the “next big thing” gets launched.
The real reason that SXSW is so influential, though, is that it’s not simply tech companies talking to other tech companies, as is the case at many other conferences. SXSW brings a cross-industry perspective, where tech intersects with everything from government and global brands to sports and fashion, and, of course, music and film.
One of the biggest tech trends shaping up at this year’s SXSW is bots. 2016 was undoubtedly the year of bots, with nearly every social network and messaging service making a play to attract bot developers. Panels at SXSW are predictably taking on the bot craze, but the question that seems to be driving much of the conversation is: What now?
The cross-industry appeal of SXSW allows for discussions of bots in some entirely new ways. The sheer range of bot conversations this year emphasizes not only their potential, but also the challenges we face in crafting bot strategies and building bots on a growing number of platforms.
Below, we’ve highlighted some of our favorite panels that will be tackling bot issues at SXSW, outlining some of the trends we see emerging from the programming. The presentations and panels around bots extend to everything from “bot activism” to how the “conversational economy” is reshaping commerce to even how artists are working with bots.
Brands and customer engagement
It’s no surprise that brands and agencies have been at the forefront of experimenting with bots, looking for new ways to engage with customers and take advantage of social networks and messaging. After all, you want to be where your customers are and continuously improve on their experience.
Yet there are still growing pains as bot technologies rapidly mature. We can expect a lot of discussion about tackling the challenges of scaling bots across platforms, making sure that they reflect brand values as they engage customers, and about how we measure the success of bot engagements.
Representatives from Capital One and 1-800-FLOWERS will tackle questions about bots and brands, like “How does conversational marketing change the ‘relationship’ between consumer and brand, if at all?” And “Is the marketing bot trend really serving customers better through more personalized and personable interactions?”
With representatives from Amazon, Yahoo, Assist, and Pandorabots, this panel will look at how bots are making for unlikely partnerships between companies and platforms and how they are changing the way consumers search for and discover information.
A look at lessons learned in developing Facebook Messenger bots over the past year, with participants from Facebook and developer partners. They’ll discuss best practices, but also how bots are making designers and developers “reconsider interaction models, manage platform risk, and lead users into a new conversational paradigm.”
Hubspot CTO and cofounder Dharmesh Shah will talk about building the popular GrowthBot for Slack and how bots can drive growth and productivity for businesses.
Commerce and bots
One of the areas where bots are having the most transformative impact is commerce. Here, bots are creating easier and faster payment options and are also shifting the entire nature of selling from purely transactional to conversational.
Perhaps…