The advancements of Artificial Intelligence and work automation is changing the course of the world. It has a great political, social and mental impact on our everyday lives and it’s not a shady fantasy of the future. It’s happening right now.

Automation was taking blue-collar jobs for years, but we are now at a point where it’s about to take jobs of white-collar workers too. [1, 2]

What impact will it have on you? Are you prepared for the change?

I personally believe that chatbots market will create new jobs opportunities. Here is a list of 12 I predict will appear.

Chatbot Developer

Good news for software developers. Building bots and chatbots requires technical skills.

There will be good money to make in that area, so if you plan to advance your career in this direction I advise you start your education now.

Make yourself comfortable with working on a backend (Java, Node, Python, it doesn’t matter which language), since there is only little frontend involved in building bots.

Make sure you understand (at least the basic) concepts of AI. Especially Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

Learn to use frameworks such as BotKit or Microsoft’s Bot Framework and learn the specific API of the platform you choose to build for (e.g. Slack, Kik, Messenger, HipChat).

This website is built specifically to help you make progress in your education. Come back often to learn about building and designing chatbots.

Chatbot UX Designer

If you’ve ever built a chatbot, which was more than just a toy, you know that chatbot’s UX is hard.

As with everything that’s hard we’ll need people who can make it easy. Those people with be the UX designers focused primarily on chatbots. They will need to know (among other things) the best conversational UI/UX practices, understand how humans interact over messaging apps, know tools for mocking and prototyping a chatbot.

Some challenges such designers will face are:

• If the main communication channel is text, how does a user discover bot’s functionalities?
• How should we handle exceptional situations like errors?
• What if a user leaves a session in a middle of purchasing a product?
• On the website we can present a dozen of products we are selling..How to limit this to only few inside a messenger?

Luckily I got you covered on this one as well. This page is about building chatbots and I will post articles about chatbots UX and UI frequently.

Chatbot Consultant

How should you build a commerce bot? Which tools your company should buy to solve a specific problem? How much do you need to spend? What kind of architecture and infrastructure do you need? What type of specialists do you need to hire? Do you even need a chatbot?

A good consultant or a consultancy firm will help you with that.

Chatbot Copywriter

Try talking to a chatbot. The majority of them is still pretty dumb and we’ll need to make a lot of effort to, at least, make them appear smart.

Chatbots communicate with text for most of the time. You want these messages to be crisp, short, informative and (ideally) fun/relaxed/engaging.

We will need skilled, creative writers who can convey any message in a way that won’t clutter the chat space.

These writers will write in all kinds of styles: formal, relaxed, fun, professional etc. All will depend on the chatbot and its audience.

The individual chatbot style is not, however, limited to raw text. Messaging platforms allow sending emojis, stickers, GIFs, photos and even voice messages. Is it appropriate to send a sticker to a CEO of a bank? Which GIF meme should we send to a teenager to convey a message? Don’t forget the emotional impact of words!

Chatbot Personality Designer

Remember Westworld? Chatbots will need their personality too.

Should the chatbot be dumb, or intelligent? Should it behave like a cartoon character or like an office clerk? Should it have a backstory? Should it answer questions about its childhood? What emotional triggers will a user push by insulting it? How should it react to political questions? Should it be impersonal or emotional? How to make it sound real? Should it be male, female or have no gender?

People with the ability to tell captivating stories should flourish here. They will define how our interaction with a chatbot feels like. They will decide about the style of the conversation (does it use slang words? does it mimic a particular dialect?) and how we perceive the bot (is it nice? comforting? witty? professional?). They will help us feel more connected with bots and feel less intimidated by them.

Chatbot Marketer

You heard chatbots are the new craze right now and you decided to open a chatbot ice cream store.

You spent a lot of money on a software developer, shipped the product and… no one is using it…

Chatbots may have the same origin as websites or apps, but the devil is in the details. Marketers specialising in the field will be the ones who know these details! Not only they will tell you how to promote, define and sell your chatbot, but they also will tell you how to use that bot to attract more customers and to retain your current ones.

Chatbot Knowledge Provider

If we want our bots to be smart we will have to teach them or allow them to teach themselves. In order to do that we need banks of structured knowledge, a bot can learn from. Those catalogues of information will be prepared by AI experts in cooperation with domain specialists (biochemistry, math, law, accounting).

At some point there might be room for companies that expose knowledge-as-a-service and chatbots will be able to learn anything they need by accessing these databases. Or, by simply asking other chatbots to work out a problem for them.

Chatbot Educator

To make any of those job positions possible we will need teachers.

You can already find many great guides, tutorials and courses on subjects like how to build or how to design bots. I anticipate more will be created when the market matures.

Chatbot Tools Manufacturers

Someone has to build the tools for building chatbots. This is an area of the intense contribution these days. Many companies are investing in developing such tools, but there is still place for you here.

Some ideas of things we will need: chatbot frameworks, tools for prototyping bots, tools for preparing chatbot mockups, tools for designing conversations, tools for testing chatbots, tools for designing speech style, tools for building bots without code, tools for designing a marketing campaigns, tools for distributing bots, tools for analysing data gathered by chatbots, tools for collecting chatbot’s statistics.

Chatbot operators / backstagers

Imagine a chatbot operating in a bank. The conversation goes pretty well, but at some point the bot replies:

“Sorry I don’t understand you.”

This is a frustrating experience and can result in ending a call. Potentially, losing a client. What we could do is to forward the rest of the conversation to one of the bot operators. It would be a skilled, knowledgeable human that would answer your question. In the meantime, the bot would listen to your conversation and learn from it.

Chatbots Reviewer

Which bots should you use? How do others rate bots? Is the experience as good as the producer claims it is? How do similar bots compare?

Chatbot Reviewer would test, review, compare and score different bots. These people could operate as part of a larger group of chatbot journalists, commentators and evangelists.

Chatbot Skills Providers

Imagine you approach a bot which sells shoes. You expect it will allow you to view, select and purchase shoes, sure. But what if you ask him: where’s the nearest bank. Or: how was your day? Should your bot remain silent or reply with a generic “I don’t understand” message? Even though you theoretically can do that it may be a good option to act like a human would.

There are many common sense skills that we could expect from bots. I think there will be a niche for companies that provide such skills as a service.

For example: telling jokes, checking the weather, singing songs, answering art questions, giving historical facts, directing to the closest gas station etc.

At the end, it will probably be impractical to have a dozen of bots for small tasks when one bot could handle all of them.

What else?

Please leave comments below. Let me know if you agree with my predictions or if you think the job market will be completely different.

Thanks for reading and come back soon for more chatbots content!