122: The Future of Communication is Facebook

At the recent F8 Developer Summit, Facebook released Bot Engine, to help create smarter bots, specifically for Facebook Messenger. The Bot Engine is developed from Wit.ai, which Facebook acquired last year. Wit.ai is the framework for Facebook Messenger. Facebook's new strategy with Bot Engine is to get developers to embrace the framework and give Facebook Messenger users some specialized bots. “Send receive API is more than enough,” Facebook VP of Messaging Products David Marcus said. “But if you want to build more complex bots, you can use our Bot Engine.” The Bot Engine relies on machine learning. It means that you can feed it sample conversations so that it can handle many different variations of the same questions. I caught up with Dennis Yu, CTO of Blitzmetrics, to get some of his inside insights on what’s going on. Dennis is so far ahead of the curve when it comes to what is going on, I thought it would be too much to handle for some of you, but he insisted the people need to know this stuff. On bots economic impact: People are fundamentally cognitively lazy-- so why have to figure out what you want and hunt it down when the AI can guess intelligently and do it for you? Bots will be so smart that most humans in process-driven jobs will be unnecessary. The bot wars begun long ago and Facebook has the scale and strategy to win. Facebook has solved the infrastructure, programming, and even AI issues-- making it easier, ironically, for anyone to start a large-scale business. Minority Report is almost here. While the masses will be out of jobs (see World Economic Forum research), the botwars will create entrepreneurship like the world has never seen before. The financial ramification is that Facebook is the ultimate utility-- providing nearly everything "free" to use. You need only agree to connect yourself to the metaverse and if you're a business, use their advertising platform. On what the Messenger platform means for business marketers: Marketers and marketing tool providers face a Faustian bargain, that is, adopt the platform to have it all "solved for you" or perish. Facebook Messenger is a platform for not just communication but all commerce, with the power of all of Facebook's federated properties behind it, all reinforcing one another. From a marketing standpoint, Facebook is automating away the friction of having to "construct" complex funnels, allocate budget, and whatever else that isn't directly delighting customers. From a business standpoint, Facebook has the world's most powerful marketing platform. Now all they need is GCT (goals, content, and targeting) to be able to maximize your bus