We expect messaging apps to play a key role throughout the customer life cycle but more specifically to enable brands to deepen conversations with their customers during the retention phases. Why? Because messaging apps combine the three keys to powerful relationships in any digital environment: frequency of use, emotional connection, and convenience.

While Asian messaging apps such as WeChat or Line are the most advanced, Facebook is really the only one that competes at scale, due to its combined reach of WhatsApp and Messenger. Innovation in adjacent technologies (natural language processing, semantic search,…), especially machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, will blur the lines between messaging apps, bots, and voice-based intelligent agents. But because messaging apps have more users engaged for more minutes today, they will be a dominant platform through which people will first experience and refine their expectations of AI-based tools.