2.5bn of the world's population, that’s over half of all internet users, have at least one messaging app on their mobile. Whilst daily views on Snapchat now exceed 10bn, surpassing Facebook's own count.

It's early days for brands in messaging apps. Burberry stirred up a huge amount of earned coverage by Snapchatting a recent fashion shoot, H&M is one of 20m businesses with a fully functional online store on WeChat and the likes of Coca Cola and M&Ms offer users branded stickers on popular Japanese app LINE. 

Yet things are about to get a whole lot more interesting with Facebook's rollout of Bots for Messenger platform.

Soon any brand will be able to build a bot for users to interact with within Facebook Messenger, and Facebook M – the platform’s AI personal assistant - will be interrupting user conversations with suggested services from different brand bots. The fashion brand Spring is one of the first to test this platform to guide customers through outfit choices, whilst KLM's bot responds to questions around flight details.

As bot technology improves and users become more familiar, it’s not hard to imagine the countless ways that brands will soon be providing new customer experiences.

Key Take Outs:

Customer Service. Historically brands have needed huge customer service teams to handle a constant stream of enquires. Bots could help automate this, freeing up resource.

Conversational UI. Could bots help sectors with highly involved purchase procedures (like buying a car) make the process less complicated and a more personable experience.

Storytelling. Bots will help brands to extend and elaborate on their creative campaigns, giving users the opportunity to explore further storylines and even characters. Chances are that if the Old Spice guy had launched this year, users would be chatting to him within Facebook Messenger.

To find out more about the project, contact Jonathan Akwue at Lost Boys