What's Next? Conversational Enterprise Applications

There is a lot of chatter these days (excuse the pun) around AI, machine learning, and chat bots and how this technology stack can be used to engage with users, at a human like level, to exchange information and automate tasks. The elusive goal of an all intelligent AI machine that can by indistinguishable from a human to help us with day to day tasks has been with us since the Turing test and has been embedded in our psyche from countless sci-fi movies.

Today, that elusive goal is closer with the many advancements in computing and communication technology. We are starting to see the real application of such technology in tools like Slack where chat bots sit in the background ready to engage in channels/rooms to assist and respond to natural language chat communications to help solve/automate DevOps tasks or monitor and manage IoT infrastructure among many other applications. And we also see it with more casual consumer applications like Siri, Cortana and Alexa.

Where this is all headed is exciting both for consumer and enterprise applications. However a lot of the current focus for how and where conversational interfaces can be applied is still stuck in the past. In my opinion there is too much attention given, for example, to a chat bot's personality and if that chat bot is behaving with true human like mannerisms. I think this distracts from the actual transformation that is happening and the opportunities that lie ahead for where and how conversational interfaces can transform business applications. A conversational interface does not necessary need a human personality to be effective - keep that in mind when you go down the path of building this new form of user experience into your applications.

If we look back in time, we started first with "dumb" computer command line interfaces (i.e. the green screen CLI), then through the 80s, 90s, and early apart of this century we went through a steady evolution toward more visually rich human to computer UX (think desktop apps, web x.0 and mobile). Interestingly enough, this has brought us full circle and back to the command line interface (CLI). But this new CLI is now "intelligent" and has the potential to take us to the promised land of conversational human to computer interaction. I wont get into the theory of why the intelligent CLI (aka the conversational interface) has reemerged and why it will prove to be more effective than our current bloated visual UX application world. And remember that the conversational interface can also be voice driven, but voice to text is more or less an added bonus and part of the longer technology maturity in this space.

What does the future hold? I propose that this next generation intelligent CLI should augment every business application in the coming years. Every enterprise should take a hard look at their current UI applications (business and consumer facing applications at every level) and make it a high priority to embed AI chat bot like intelligent CLIs (with or without a personality :) into every user experience and business function they have and for every application persona. Whether you are building an ERP application for an HR manager or a sales executive, or an IoT monitoring platform or an analytics dashboard, every one of these applications should have an intelligent conversational interface to augment the visual interface. By 2020 any enterprise not beginning to bring to the market such investments in conversational interfaces within their applications will be left in the dark ages of the visual only UX world.