Business Growth with AI, Part 2: The Bots and Partnerships Bonanza
At Workplace from Meta, steering the third-party partnerships ecosystem felt like a dynamic playing field — a real-life Dragon’s Den scenario.
What always bothered me about the TV show was not having the chance to hear why a Dragon was interested in making an offer or their thought process as they wrestled the deal from one of their rivals.
The red button on the remote control had the perfect solution though I haven’t owned a TV for over 15 years, and streaming services don’t provide a direct match for the red button feature.
I would like to extend an invitation to press the metaphorical ‘red button’, helping you understand why some businesses secured approval while others didn’t. One key differentiator? The skillful use of AI to ingeniously solve our customers’ most intricate problems, making each partnership a strategic success.
I evaluated an average of 5 business pitches per week over a one-year period, totalling over 230 potential partners seeking integration.
CEOs passionately poured their hearts into their partnership proposals, fervently pitching their solutions. Their trust and friendship continue to humble me, and it’s a sentiment I hold dear.
In that initial interaction, my objective was to evaluate their product offering, purpose, alignment with our customer and business needs, platform readiness or potential to build new services: Graph API and Webhooks readiness, Developer Platform access and bot creation, platform and security compliance, permission handling and more as described in the below image.
The Forrester Consulting study below shows the tangible benefits these partnerships brought to every organisation that had a Workplace instance.
Bots Bonanza: bots, bots and more bots
Below, you’ll discover a carefully selected lineup of my top 20 bots seamlessly integrated into Workplace. This provides a comprehensive yet focused showcase of how these startup founders cleverly employed AI to augment their offerings and details on how these services were utilised by our enterprise customers.
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Please note: I don’t receive referral fees for sharing links to the mentioned products. My aim is to showcase tools that have genuinely contributed to our success. This list of Workplace integrations is not exhaustive and is not intended as an endorsement.
The Bot Platform
Helps businesses create and manage chatbots that can automate tasks, provide customer support, and engage with users, without complex coding or tech knowledge. It uses AI to enable chatbots to understand and respond to natural language queries, personalise the user experience, and automate customer support. The case of Honest Burgers is an interesting one — they built over 50 bots spanning a range of use cases, saw a 73% engagement rate from staff, 100% completion rate on compliance training and generated a 15.6X positive ROI in their first year.
Botmaker
A chatbot development platform that helps businesses create and manage chatbots without any coding required. It uses AI to automate the chatbot development process, generating content, automating conversations and performance insights. Their templates are phenomenal; Domino’s created a Chatbot on WhatsApp to allow their customers to buy pizzas through the chat. The customer can choose flavour, sides, drinks, and many other options.
Thanks Bot
A chatbot that helps businesses improve employee engagement by sending personalised thank-you messages to other employees; this information is then channelled into the employee performance record. The manager and skip level manager receive a copy of the message which is later used for performance evaluation and continuous feedback discussions. It uses AI to analyse customer data and identify opportunities to send thank-you messages. I love the instant feedback nature of the tool and how easily it makes it possible to provide visibility of a job well done multiple lines above a reporting line.
Sideways6 IdeasBot
An idea management platform that uses AI to analyse user feedback and identify trends and opportunities. AstraZeneca took a leap of faith, and in the course of three weeks, 77,000 ideas, comments and likes were contributed from employees in 70 countries, many of which will go on to influence what the business would look like in years to come.
Bloomberg and Reuters Bot
These chatbots provide users with real-time financial news and data, they use AI to analyse financial data and generate personalised insights for users.
Kudo Live Streaming Bot
Kudo is a cloud-based platform that provides live interpretation services for virtual meetings, webinars and events. It supports over 200 spoken and sign languages. Kudo uses AI to improve the accuracy, affordability, and accessibility of live interpretation and speech to speech translation.
Zoom, BlueJeans, Microsoft Teams & Cisco Webex Bots
These bots help businesses improve communication and collaboration by providing users with access to video conferencing tools and features. They use AI to understand and respond to natural language queries, background noise cancellation, intelligent meeting insights, highlights and summarisation and automated participant identification and tracking through face recognition.
AI Producer Bot
AI Producer turns your meetings into a professional broadcast and delivers those broadcasts to Workplace by Meta and other destinations. It also helps businesses automate the video production process by generating video transcripts, creating subtitles and adding effects. It uses AI for scene switching, transitions, and other production related tasks.
Polly
Polly is a platform that helps businesses collect feedback from their customers and employees via surveys, polls, Q&A, suggestions, stand-ups and workflows. It uses AI to analyse the feedback and generate insights that businesses can use to improve their products and services.
Preppio
Preppio is a HR, talent and payroll solution that supports employee onboarding and off-boarding. It helps businesses streamline their onboarding process and improve employee experience through features like HR help desk, absence management, time tracking, compensation management, training, etc. It uses AI to personalise employee onboarding experience and track their progress.
Google Drive Bot
This is a chatbot that helps users manage their Google Drive files by automating tasks such as searching for files, creating new documents, and sharing files with others. Google Drive Bot uses AI to understand and respond to natural language queries.
Receptionist Bot
Receptionist Bot helps businesses automate tasks such as greeting visitors and scheduling appointments. Receptionist Bot uses AI to understand and respond to natural language queries, and to integrate with other systems such as calendars and scheduling software.
One Login and Okta Bots
These are chatbots that help businesses improve security by automating tasks such as user authentication and access control, using AI to detect and prevent fraud, risk based authentication, anomaly detection, adaptive authentication and user profiling.
Appspace Bot
Appspace, a dynamic digital signage platform, revolutionises how businesses communicate and collaborate by granting users access to a myriad of information and resources from diverse sources. Picture this: a state of alert reverberates through your offices. Appspace effortlessly integrates with all digital signage platforms, allowing you to craft the message once and disseminate it across monitors, TVs, reception boards, intranet, Workplace, meeting rooms, email, and more.
Asana Bot
The Asana’s bot helps businesses manage their work by automating tasks such as creating and assigning tasks, managing deadlines, and tracking progress. It uses AI to understand and respond to natural language queries, smart update of task status and workflows, and to suggest relevant tasks, projects, and people to users based on their context.
Smarsh Bot
Smarsh Bot is a chatbot that utilises AI to help businesses comply with regulations by archiving, classifying and monitoring electronic communications.
Meta Suite Applied AI
Beyond Workplace, I would attempt to unfold the rich tapestry of AI applications across Meta’s suite, from personalised experiences and content recommendations to image and video processing, translation, and augmented reality enough to provide a taste of what is possible.
Personalization
Supports experience personalisation for each user, such as by recommending friends, showing relevant ads and ranking content. This has been one of the most exhilarating times in my career whilst working for the Meta Ads Suite Experimentation Platform. All our users (half of the world population) are exposed to thousands of experiments run daily in major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, Reels, Workplace, etc.
Our systems process every alteration to Ads, including changes to ML models and substantial re-architectures, ensuring that 98% of Meta’s annual revenue, totaling $98 billion, is facilitated. At any given moment, approximately 1500 concurrent experiments are active in production, reaching 100% of Meta’s user base or 3.9 billion MAU. These experiments operate on a network of 1 million machines, supporting Ads backends and the pipelines that handle 260 Tib of daily data from experimentation events.
Content recommendation
AI-powered content recommendation extends to posts from friends, pages, groups, articles, videos, photos and many great causes. Thanks to these product enhancements, 35 million blood donors registered their intent, resulting in thousands of blood donation matches within the initial two weeks of the campaign in India.
Image and video processing
Improves the quality of images and videos by removing noise, enhancing contrast, and detecting objects.
Translation
Neural Machine Translations (NMT), powers an astounding 23 billion translations globally, facilitating seamless communication across diverse languages.
Natural language processing
Meta uses AI and ML to understand and process natural language and provide Rayban Stories with audio augmentation, voice commands to control the device hands free, gesture recognition such as swiping or tapping, automated volume adjustment, providing an overall more intuitive and responsive user experience.
Fraud detection, safety and security
Used to detect and prevent fraud, such as spam, phishing, and fake accounts and to protect users from harmful content and scams. Removal of offensive content containing nudity, pornography, hate speech, self harm, etc.
Augmented reality and virtual reality
Meta uses AI and ML to develop and improve augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. For example by tracking the user’s head and body movements and to render the virtual environment in a way that is realistic and immersive. It also supports recognizing objects in the real world and to reconstruct them in the virtual environment.
Social Experiences
Generate synthetic avatars and to enable users to communicate with each other in natural ways. ‘Using groundbreaking 3D capture technology and AI systems, Codec Avatars could let people in the future create lifelike virtual avatars of themselves quickly and easily, helping social connections in virtual reality become as natural and common as those in the real world’.
Game development
Developing new and innovative VR games and experiences. For example to create procedurally generated worlds, to develop realistic and challenging AI opponents, and to create new forms of gameplay.
AI Experiences Across Family of Apps and Devices
Though these AI experiences, you can message and interact with 28 different AIs on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. You can think of these AIs as a new cast of characters — all with unique backstories.
Meta AI
Meta AI is a new assistant you can chat with 1-on-1 or message in group chats. It can make recommendations in a pinch, make you laugh when you need a good joke, settle a debate in a group chat and generally be there to answer questions or teach you something new.
Creative AI tools
The creative tool allows you to create and share custom stickers or update the visual style of your photos with a simple text prompt.
Inclusion and Belonging
Generating descriptions for the visually impaired
Research
Continuous research in a variety of areas, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning.
As we embrace the multifaceted capabilities of AI, this journey exemplifies the transformative potential that collaboration, innovation, and intelligent automation hold for businesses worldwide.
For CEOs, business leaders and product managers, the ‘red button’ symbolises open and honest feedback, leading to valuable insights that foster continuous learning. If you missed a deal, a round of investment, or a partnership, stay focused. Press that button, seek feedback, take it onboard, make amendments if needed and carry on. Never cease researching, connecting, reaching, developing and solving real customer problems.
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Stay blessed,
Katherine
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