In 2018, we had the pleasure of being joined by Chatbase at the AI Assistant Summit in San Francisco. Chatbase was founded in 2016 inside Area 120, a startup incubator operated by Google, their goal was to make it easier for bot builders to analyze and optimize any conversational experience. By late 2017, thanks in large part to their unique vantage point as a leading bot analytics service, Chatbase observed among their users the emergence of customer service as the proverbial killer app for conversational AI. That prediction has been confirmed, with a clearly growing interest (verified by analysts) among customer-centric companies in building AI-powered customer service virtual agents. We are excited to have Chatbase back at the Deep Learning Summit, San Francisco in January 2019 on the AI Assistant Stage, to see more about the latest additions to their platform and how they will be helping unlock hidden insights from chats and call logs to guide the development of the right AI-powered virtual agent.

We caught up with Justin Kestelyn, Head of Product Marketing at Chatbase to see how 2018 has been for them and what we can expect to see from them in 2019.

How has 2018 been for Chatbase? How have you grown since the beginning of the year?

2018 has been good to us, and good for the industry!

Last summer, we introduced a new service called Virtual Agent Modeling (currently available through an Early Access program) designed to help those companies build virtual agents faster and smarter. It uses Google’s machine learning and search capabilities to uncover insights about past customer interactions from call and chat logs, enabling data-driven development of a virtual agent engineered for customer satisfaction -- instead of “flying blind” with manual methods based on brainstorming and guesswork. That’s where we see the industry going: toward treating virtual agents as a critical customer channel, with all the associated rigor and thoughtfulness during their development.

Furthermore, we’re excited about the fact that our first product, Virtual Agent Analytics, continues to be widely adopted by companies like Best Buy Canada, Ticketmaster, and Keller-Williams Realty, having unlocked insights for hundreds of thousands of bots and billions of messages to date.

What was your purpose of joining the AI Assistant Summit in San Francisco last year?

Chatbase Virtual Agent Analytics became generally available in November 2017. Involvement in that event was part of a launch plan designed to generally raise awareness about the important role of analytics in creating a good experience for bot end-users, and specifically to introduce Chatbase to the bot builder ecosystem.

We got a lot of exposure at that event, and had really good conversations with attendees.

Why are you joining us again on the AI Assistant Stage in San Francisco, 2019?

It’s critical to stay connected with users. So even though we get good insight into emerging trends in the aggregate by offering our analytics service, there’s no substitute for face-to-face conversations at industry events like Deep Learning Summit for understanding customer problems across various industries and applications.

What are the plans for Chatbase in 2019? Where do you see yourself going as a company?

We predict that more and more customers will want to build AI-powered customer service virtual agents in 2019. We’ll work hard to help them do that in a way that ultimately improves customer satisfaction while reducing development time and complexity. It’s really not worth the risk to build one any other way, because most of their own customers won’t tolerate more than one or two bad experiences with a virtual agent.

Where can we keep up to date with Chatbase?

The most robust way to stay up to date is to subscribe to the Chatbase email newsletter (see form in footer at For a more real-time experience, following Chatbase on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn will also do the job. Either way, please stay tuned because we expect to make even more progress for customers in 2019 and beyond!

Make sure to get your tickets now to join Chatbase here.