Democratizing Large Enterprise Chatbots for Small Businesses

I must confess, I am a bit of a nut about chatbots. I have been doing AI and related technologies (including NLP and bots-like tech) for quite some time and was a firm believer in the early waves of chatbots (back then we called them virtual agents – this is circa 2000 and was just starting to enter the realm of large enterprises). Still am a firm believer, despite the bad name that they engendered through the early parts of this century due to lack of quantifiable results. I mean, the worked – they just didn’t register well enough with the metrics we needed to justify them.