Brent Leary:
You said businesses have been focused on building websites for over a decade but going forward they are going to focus on building bots to work with websites. How soon do you see that happening?
Dharmesh Shah:
The reason I think bots should supplement websites comes back to humans are - and it is in a positive way – fundamentally lazy. They come to a website, let’s say they have a question in their head; Somebody comes to the HubSpot website and say's 'oh can I buy this month-to-month as a requirement in our contract' - that's the question you have. You are not sure if that is on the pricing page or is out on the terms of service, so where do I go to get that question answered?
In the early days what’s going to happen is the bots are going to be playing more triage; maybe they can answer 5 percent the questions with some reasonable degree of accuracy. Over time that percentage will go up and up and up because we will have this growing knowledge base; the bot will know more and more things. It will learn essentially over time. And this is not that far off.
Once the bot gets used enough, in the same way Google's search engine gives you auto-suggest the bots will give you auto-suggest. Not just based on things you are typing. But based on what you've done on the website. You went to the pricing page and you typed these two characters so you're probably asking this question.
Brent Leary:
What's the future of digital marketing. Is it what we just talked about or is it something we haven't even conjured up?
Dharmesh Shah:
Any activity in marketing that is fundamentally rote, repetitive, those things are going to start moving more and more to software. It's just the way to do it because we shouldn't be spending precious human time on something that computers can do better. That doesn't make sense. We're going to see that shift happen. Just in my mind inevitable. That's going to be the next five years.
The second thing... When you were building software products and websites the marketers helped write the copy for the website and then it was a web designer that said hey I'm going to help you make that look nice. In five years what's going to happen is marketers are going to have much more direct involvement in creating the experience of a company.
Brent Leary:
Will there be empathy automation? Or will humans still use their empathy along with all the other tools that you just talked about?
Dharmesh Shah:
I think this move to machines and software will actually help us be more empathetic. So I had this glib answer once when someone asked me around this man vs. machine question; My answer is I've met humans that are not all that empathetic. Travel on the airlines and especially when flights are delayed and there's a lack of empathy for the situation. And the reason for that lack of empathy - and I'm an optimist and believe in humans overall - is the lack of empathy occurs when people are stressed out.
So if we can take those things out, that could hopefully help us empathize at scale. That would be a good thing to think about. That's where the software helps. We have to automate some things in order to make that possible, otherwise it won't work.