Most Slack integrations are essentially first-generation chatbots (parsed and tokenised text input linked to a finite state machine to actually do things), and they&#x27;re hugely popular among users. I see Microsoft and Facebook&#x27;s moves as bringing those things to a wider audience - instead of telling Hubot to deploy some code using Slack we&#x27;ll tell a brand we&#x27;ve bought something from that an order has been delayed using Facebook.<p>People already seem to prefer to interact with a brand using Twitter than the phone. There&#x27;s no reason why many Twitter interactions need a human being behind them.<p>Chatbots are essentially Blade Runner for customer relations. Sort of.