What is the significance of communication bots?

With advances in artificial intelligence and the growing use of messaging systems for both consumer and business communication, a new wave of bots as personal assistants has taken off. Major categories of bot technology include task bots that perform routine chores within digital systems and social bots that mimic human conversation.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes bots will transform technology usage the same way mobile apps have. As bot capability is added to more devices and systems-particularly workgroup messaging systems, where a growing number of employees now conduct increasing amounts of their routine business communication-bots are finally entering the mainstream. If you've ever carried on a Facebook Messenger conversation with the band Maroon 5, for example, you were talking with a bot.
Bots are popular on the widely used Slack workgroup messaging system, where they can do everything from ordering lunch to monitoring the mood of team conversations. The Howdy bot, for example, can perform such tasks as simultaneously interviewing all the members of a project team to give the team leader a real-time status update. On Slack, bots are treated just like human team members in many ways-they can send and receive messages, be assigned tasks, and be invited to join specific groups and communication channels. As bots get better at understanding language, they'll be able to contribute to conversations, such as finding background information that could help solve a problem colleagues are discussing, without anyone asking for their help.
How far this bot revolution will go is anybody's guess, but the appeal of this new generation of digital genies is undeniable. They are well connected to the systems that people use every day on the job, and they can reduce the need to navigate yet another website or learn yet another app in order to get something done. Instead, you just message your bot and let it figure out how to make things happen.