https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2018/07/14/the-24-billion-chatbot-industry-sucks-because-it-needs-better-ai/

In 2014, WIRED would profile a “boring” company called Slack beginning a media and venture-based obsession with bringing chat to every corner of our work lives. Somewhere along the way, the growth of chat-based enterprise communication was conflated with a preference for doing everything in a chat window, and thus we were given chatbots.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would go on to call them “the new interface,” and by 2017 over $24 billion in funding had gone into chatbot companies.