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. A year later, and the landscape of chatbot funding is desolate. And it’s because they were never truly built to…

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