Are Chatbots still the next big thing?

Welcome to another edition of what we’re determined to make the best damn newsletter in AI. Here we’ll break down AI topics that matter, open your mind to use cases, and keep you ahead of the curve.

Our #1 goal is to be useful. So please shoot us an email 📩 if you have questions or feedback, and especially if you implement something we share!

Here's what we're covering today:

• The quick hits of big tech and their chatbot news

• Character AI’s crazy growth

• Two internal use cases for custom chatbots that rock

Let’s get to it! 👇

TODAY'S PERSPECTIVE

Are chatbots still hot? 🔥

Character AI hit 170M+ monthly visits in May. So, we’d say yes.

And the rest of the AI powered chatbot market is MOVING with them.

Here’s the big news and announcements that can show us where the market is headed.

First, social.

If you’re not familiar with Character AI, they are a character-based chatbot website that’s 100% free. While they’ve been criticized for NSFW content, their crazy growth and usage stats don’t lie about the demand.

And other social platforms are taking notice.

A credible leak suggests Instagram is working on their own integrated chatbot experiences, similar to Snapchat’s My AI. And Snapchat’s continued investing in their My AI bot, which can now send and receive “snaps”. Yes, for the nerds here - that means it’s multimodal 😍.

But it’s not just social.

Glean just unveiled Glean Chat, Box has Box AI, and Dropbox has Dash - all enterprise-grade search experiences using AI to help you chat or search your company’s documents and knowledge in a more powerful way.

If the hundreds of millions (if not billions+) of dollars being poured into chatbot experiences are a sign, then chat looks like it’s here to stay - at least in some form.

What kinds of use cases are we seeing? Glad you asked 👇

USE CASE DEEP DIVE

Use cases for internal custom chatbots

Chatbots are clearly all the rage. And while tech giants are building their own, you might be wondering how a chatbot can help you.

While there’s almost limitless use cases, we believe internal use cases are some of the strongest. They are low risk because they aren’t touching customers, they typically can leverage large knowledge bases of text you already have, and can bring real productivity gains to you or your team.

Here are two of our favorite internal custom chatbot use cases we’ve seen recently:

Employee onboarding — For businesses with lengthy employee onboarding or training programs, a chatbot customized with training materials can serve as a tool during onboarding and live on as an asset long after so that employees can get questions with ease.

For developers — A chatbot with access to your code base is basically like having a staff engineer that’s been there since day 1 and knows the whole thing like the back of their hand. But available, all the time.

There are also use cases across marketing, sales, content creation, IT, product development and more.

For some thoughts on a starting point, see Rachel’s post this week about identifying opportunities for AI for founders - the same rules apply here 🤩

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

AI is getting more and more integrated into our everyday business tools…

• Wordpress.com has a new AI Assistant

• LinkedIn is using generative AI to help recruiters write personalized messages to you

While some companies are continuing to step back…

• Apple really avoided the AI hype train at WWDC this week, and people are still talking about it

• CNET is overhauling it’s AI policy after backlash that some of their AI articles were found with inaccuracies because humans weren’t reviewing them, tsk tsk

And if you're really nerdy...

• Llama Index, the leading open source package for data retrieval and chatting with data using LLMs, raised $8.5M and wrote a post about their vision

• Marc Andreessan, the prolific investor from a16z, wrote a post about how AI will save the world

That's all!

We'll see you again on Tuesday. Thoughts, feedback and questions are much appreciated - respond here or shoot us a note at [email protected].

Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team