We talked about the buying a company Chatbot, a programme based on Artificial Intelligence that simulates a conversation with the user. The best known by all of us is Apple's Siri, but there are many more in the world. We are going to analyse some of the purchases that have been made in this sector in 2018.

ServiceNow acquires chatbot Parlo

In May we learned about the purchase of ServiceNow, a company that provides cloud-based solutions for business operations. Its focus was the chatbot Parlo, a business intelligence platform that uses machine learning to learn the unique language of your business.

Parlo was founded a couple of years ago in Sunnyvale, California. Thanks to the $3.1 million round of funding it received, it was able to develop this conversational chat that employs machine learning to integrate into any business. Parlo's unique algorithms make interaction with machines more conversational, making work faster, easier and more enjoyable.

It has just 10 employees and had revenues of $2 million in its last financial year of 2017. Its biggest competitors today are Pandorabots, Kore.ai and Octane AI.

ServiceNow develops applications that automate, predict, digitise and optimise business processes and tasks. It does this through customer service, security operations and human resources service delivery. ServiceNow will add Parlo technology across its entire suite of services on the Now Platform.

"We are rapidly moving away from structured data, such as form filling and data fields, towards unstructured interactions with machines. Our goal is to make everyday work interactions simple, accessible and natural for everyone. "said Pat Casey, senior vice president of ServiceNow.

Poncho, chatbot for the weather

Poncho is a weather cat designed for millennials and is very popular on Facebook Messenger. Poncho is based in New York and in recent years has raised funding from some of the world's leading Venture Capital firms, including Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Poncho has built the strongest conversation service to date and achieves over 90% retention through proprietary technology and a dedicated editorial team that creates content that connects with users.

With a staff of 10 employees, Poncho typically achieves annual revenues of $3.5 million. Its biggest competitors are companies involved in the dissemination of weather forecasts. These include WeatherBug, Weather Underground o AccuWeather. This chatbot usually gets around 3,000 visits per month.

On 29 May we learned of the buy Dirty Lemon about Poncho. Dirty Lemon is a consumer-focused beverage company that aims to challenge the retail landscape by selling its line of products. exclusively through text messagingThe company's customer base is growing, creating a personalised relationship with each member of its growing customer base.

Through this acquisition, Dirty Lemon strengthens its development team and establishes dominant leadership as the global leader in conversational commerce. "Our mission is to enable effortless transactions, bypassing existing distribution inefficiencies, to meet the needs of the modern consumer," said Zak Normandin, CEO of Dirty Lemon.

ChatbotPH joins the Sterling Paper Group

Sterling Paper Group of Companies arrived on 22 March at a purchase agreement with the Philippine company ChatbotPH for an undisclosed sum. The deal was motivated by Sterling with the intention of improving business customer service and also enable faster and easier access to information to users.

Sterling Paper Group is one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines with businesses ranging from paper to agriculture. In 1946, when the company was founded, it was only a manufacturer of photo albums and stationery. Today, it is involved in importing office furniture and other school and office supplies.

For its part, founded in 2017, ChatbotPH creates tailor-made, AI-powered virtual assistants to automate customer service. Beyond the development of chatbots, the startup also has training and AI research and development for its customers who are mainly in the lifestyle, banking and retail industries.

"This acquisition of Sterling allows us to double the momentum we've built in 2017 and scale our operations to help us to more companies harness the power of chatbots and artificial intelligence," said Ron Baetiong, co-founder and CEO of ChatbotPH.