A new report from Juniper Research revealed that consumer retail spend over chatbots will reach US$142 billion by 2024; up from US$2.8 billion in 2019. This represents average annual growth of 400% over the next four years.
According to Juniper advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies will be essential in providing a seamless retail experience for users and to establish chatbots as a reliable retail channel as it enables chatbots to efficiently process human inputs and produce more accurate automated responses to users.
The report, Chatbots: Vendor Opportunities & Market Forecasts 2020-2024, forecasts that advances in NLU capabilities will drive the effectiveness of chatbots. It anticipates that over 50% of retail chatbot interactions will be completed successfully by 2024, without the need for human intervention.
Juniper urges retailers to implement chatbots as part of a wider omnichannel retail strategy in order to maximise their presence on key retail channels.
The research also found that 80% of global consumer spend over chatbots will be attributable to discrete chatbots by 2024. These are embedded directly into a retailer’s mobile app, rather than accessed via a browser or messaging application.
The research anticipates that control over development and the ability to retain company branding will drive discrete chatbots to become the most popular chatbot medium in retail.
Who is buying chatbots
Asia in general, and China in particular, is expected to drive spending on chatbots with Juniper forecasting China buying over US$80 billion in chatbots in 2024, about 55% of global spend.
