The next disruptive technology phase is already upon here and it includes a technology designed to emulate human conversation - chatbots programmed with artificial intelligence.  It will have implications for nonprofits way beyond simply setting up a Facebook Messenger bot for your nonprofit's Facebook Brand Page. With over 100,000 bots created on the Facebook Messenger platform and the rise of AI and conversational user interfaces (think SIRI), Gartner analysts predict by 2020 the average … [Read more...]

As we enter the age of automation, more and more nonprofits are using bots. If bots are designed well, they can have impact.   The San Francisco Museum of Art recently launched an ingenious bot called "Send Me" that allows anyone to send a simple text message and receive a picture of a piece of art matching the idea, words, or phrase texted. This is not the first art museum bot, as MOMA launched a bot on Twitter that shares art in 2014 and there are a number of museums that have used Facebook … [Read more...]

In my last post about nonprofit bots, I discussed the big picture of automation in the nonprofit space and what I learned from the "The Beth Bot" experiment.    For this post, I did a landscape scan to identify some of the best examples of nonprofit bots.  (These examples use Facebook Messenger, but bots be deployed other platforms or apps.) What is a Chat Bot? Why Use One? More and more people are adopting social media messaging, including Facebook Messenger, to contact nonprofits with … [Read more...]

What is the “autonomous world?”  As Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Crowd Companies, describes it as drones, robots, chat bots, and AI.    He should know, having tracked and observed the disruption caused by online technology over the past decade. We are in the middle of global disruption due to widespread mobile Internet and cloud technology, Big Data, the rise of the collaborative economy and crowdsourcing/funding.  As Jeremiah points out, we are entering the next phase where robots, drones, bots, … [Read more...]