The Future Is B2B (Bot-to-Bot) Commerce
I recently gave a keynote at the annual INBOUND event in Boston. 19,000+ people. It was nerve-racking, but fun. I talked a lot about bots and showed off GrowthBot (a bot for marketing/sales).
One thing I didn’t get a chance to talk about is the idea of Bot-to-Bot Commerce.
Here’s the idea:
We’ll have a bot that represents our interests in terms of finding products and services. The bot will know our preferences and our context. More importantly, the bot will know how to efficiently communicate with other bots to get a task done:
- Checking inventory.
- Talking to manufacturer bots for specifications on products.
- Talking to shipping bots to figure out expected time of delivery.
Let me explain by way of illustration:
Me to MyBot> “Hey, I need to get a battery case for my new iPhone. Need to have it before I go on my trip. Looking for something light.”
MyBot scurries through my data and knows that a) the iPhone I’m talking about is the iPhone 7. It knows this because it can look at my Amazon order history. (In this regard, the future is much like the present. Almost everything I buy is on Amazon.) It also knows when I’m flying out for my trip.
MyBot to AmazonBot> search iphone7 battery case, filter by delivered in 2 days, order by weight desc. results in JSON.
AmazonBot to MyBot> {results=[…]}
MyBot to MophieBot> search iphone7 battery case, filter by delivered in 2 days, order by weight desc.
MophieBot to MyBot> {}
MyBot to AmazonBot> order ASIN893859. subscribe tracking updates.
MyBot to Me> “Have ordered the iPhone case. Tracking shipment. It’ll be there Friday morning, you’ll be leaving for the airport at 5pm.”
Bots As The New API
This doesn’t seem all that far off to me. We will soon have case-specific bots (like one for searching Amazon for products). These bots will initially be designed to communicate with humans using natural language. But, there’s no reason that these bots couldn’t also be an API of sorts for other bots.
Bots could be the future of business APIs. Yes, the output might still be in some structured form (like JSON), but it’s possible that whatever software is consuming the API might prefer to provide inputs in natural language (or pseudo-natural language). Instead of having to read the API docs to see how filters and sorting work, the developer consuming the API can just state the query in pseudo-natural language.
It’s also possible that as bots start rolling out they’ll make certain data and services available for which there is currently no standard API. They could become the defacto API.
