With the rise in smartphones comes the fall of the desire for verbal human contact. How many times have you let your phone ring only to text back the caller immediately after? If you aren’t jazzed about talking to your best friend on the phone, then you likely are way less jazzed to talk to a customer service rep from your TV provider or bank on the phone. Enter, chatbots! Messaging apps like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger started the chat trend and have facilitated adoption of chat from a personal standpoint and have begun using their technology for pushing out advertising. Other giants like Amazon have started to use chat technology for custom service. I recently forgot to include a quart of strawberries in my Amazon Fresh order and in a panic chatted up a representative to help make sure my missing fruit found its way into my order. How to know if you should incorporate chatbots into your business? The technology is still relatively new, so before jumping into chatbots, make sure it fits into your overall type of business and also your target audience’s consumption habits. If your product or service is targeting senior citizens and has complex instructions, perhaps bots are not the way to go yet. If you are slinging cheeky tee-shirts to millennials… get with the bots immediately!