Apple's Business Chat Is the Conversational Tool That Retail Needs

The program is currently in beta

Back in 2016, Facebook painted a bright future for the potential of commerce chatbots on Messenger. The rollout, however, was less than stellar, and the hype around chatbots quieted down. But there was a renewed interest in chatbots at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017 when the company introduced Apple Business Chat, a platform designed to exist within the Messenger app that lets businesses interact with consumers via a mixture of bots and humans.

Business Chat is currently in beta mode, and for good reason—the slow rollout limits the chances of repeating Facebook’s mistakes.

Going too far, too fast could be a real problem,” said Ian Jacobs, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

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