Chat Bots as Disruptive Go-to-Market Strategy: Becoming a System of Record

Chat bot startups face the challenge of converting technological advantages in natural language understanding into sustainable distribution and market dominance. By leveraging user acquisition momentum through messaging platforms, chat bot companies can potentially subvert existing systems of record through broad internal adoption, similar to B2C2B successes like Dropbox and Expensify. Success requires becoming the canonical data store for a particular domain, though execution remains difficult given incumbent competition.