Global Chatbot Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Global Chatbot Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The global chatbot market was valued at USD 3.78 billion in 2021, and it is projected to register a CAGR of 30.29% over the forecast period 2022 - 2027. The chatbot market is witnessing growth due to increasing demand for messenger applications and the growing adoption of consumer analytics by various businesses globally. Vendors globally are making significant product innovations by integrating technologies such as AI and NLP to cater to customer needs and market requirements.

Key Highlights

• Chatbots are software applications that utilize artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand human needs and guide them to the desired outcome with as minimal work by the end user as possible. They act as virtual assistants for customer experience touchpoints. Bots not only interpret the user intent but also process their requests and give prompt relevant answers.
• The market is primarily driven by the rising domination of messenger applications and increasing demand for customer analytics.
• Due to the increasing use of messenger applications, integration of chatbots with messengers yield a higher return on investment as approaching the customers on their preferred application improves user experience. Moreover, messenger applications allow chatbots to save the user's chat history for future purposes to personalize the user experience and gain actionable insights.
• The messaging app usage statistics of January 2022 released by Hootsuite show that WhatsApp has 2,000 million active monthly users, followed by WeChat with 1,263 million monthly active users, followed by Facebook Messenger with 998 million Monthly active users. Chatbots with the ability to reasonably mimic humans allow brands to engage consumers more efficiently on these growing messaging platforms.
• With the outbreak of COVID-19, chatbots have been increasingly deployed by various organizations to respond to customer queries and other related information. As different organizations adopted remote working due to the lockdowns imposed, companies became heavily dependent on chatbots to reduce the burden of customer queries due to the minimal availability of customer service employees.
• Marketing and sales teams are often under pressure to gain sales and constantly improve the customer experience. In contrast to traditional customer service, chatbots are available around the clock, even when sales personnel fail to attend to customer queries. Chatbots help support customers without interruption of working hour limitations. Moreover, bots can easily handle a high number of requests and process them all simultaneously without ever being overworked. Thus, the availability of correct information without waiting helps enterprises boost consumer experience using chatbots.

Key Market TrendsHealthcare Segment is Witnessing Significant Growth

• Chatbots in the healthcare industry find their practical usage as they can maintain anonymity about the individual's identity, especially in sensitive and mental health issues. It can track and monitor a user's behavior and anxiety to support the development of improved habits. It offers instant reactions, notifications, reminders, and the option to interact with multiple people. Depending on the application, personalization can also be kept at a high level. Some applications use measurements of physical vitals (oxygenation, heart rhythm, body temperature) via mobile sensors, and facial recognition is used to track the behavior of patients.
• The extensive healthcare data, such as disease symptoms, diagnoses, markers, and potential treatments, can be used to train chatbot algorithms. Chatbots are trained on massive healthcare data using public datasets such as COVIDX for COVID-19 and Wisconsin Breast Cancer Diagnosis (WBCD). Conversational chatbots of various intelligence levels may comprehend the user's questions and respond using pre-defined labels from the training data. For instance, the Healthily app gives information on the symptoms of various diseases and assessments of overall health and patient progress. Similarly, the Ada app can check the users' symptoms on the go without an appointment. Ada is a fast AI-powered symptom checker that can help the user 24/7. Despite the time and location, in some cases, it has provided correct disease suggestions earlier than the time of clinical diagnosis.
• Chatbots are utilized in the medical facility system to extract information about appropriate physicians, open slots, clinics, and pharmacy hours. Patients can use chatbots to tell them about their existing health issues, discover doctors and dentists who are right for them, find available time slots, and schedule, reschedule, and remove appointments. Chatbots are also incorporated into the device calendars of the users to give medical appointment reminders and updates.
• In July 2022, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced its partnership with the Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust to develop digital solutions that increase specialists' productivity and reduce patient waiting times. TCS is anticipated to develop an innovative artificial intelligence-based chatbot, which could transform the way headache patients are diagnosed and treated at the center in Liverpool
• In May 2022, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals announced a WhatsApp-based chatbot to help patients suffering from fungal infections adhere to the recommended treatment duration. The company developed the digital patient education tool 'Hello Skin' in collaboration with the Indian Association of Dermatologists, Venereologists, and Leprologists (IADVL).

Asia-Pacific to Witness the Highest Growth

• The Asian-Pacific region is witnessing a significant increase in industrialization, increasing the need for chatbots in the market studied. The increasing retail and e-commerce business in emerging economies, such as China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand, accelerated the high demand and significant adoption of chatbots by retailers and e-commerce business owners.
• The Asian-Pacific chatbot market during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced steady growth. Due to increased COVID-19-infected patients in the region and the lockdown announced by the government of significant economies in the area, the deployments of chatbots by various organizations to handle the patients' queries related to their medication and consultation with doctors online from a remote location has been increased.
• In August 2021, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) introduced Urja. This AI-enabled chatbot is the country's first chatbot in the oil and gas industry to provide customers with an interface for a seamless self-service experience and faster resolution of queries and issues. The virtual assistant offers services such as LPG booking, price, payment status, delivery status of booked LPG cylinders, and refill history.
• With the rapidly expanding information and communications technology infrastructures in leading economies, such as China and India, the market is expected to grow further in the region. For instance, the region's government is taking initiatives to support the demand for chatbots in Asia-Pacific. The Victorian government rolled out Australia's first multilingual WhatsApp chatbot in July 2022. The AskVic WhatsApp chatbot is expected to provide culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia's state of Victoria with COVID-19 information and support. This is expected to increase trust further and use the wide range of translated information the Victorian government provides.
• Owing to the increased technological need, the region is witnessing the emergence of startups to help in providing a better customer experience. Furthermore, in April 2022, Omnichat, a Hong Kong-based chat commerce solution, announced that it raised USD 1.8 million in pre-series A funding. Omnichat helps online sellers to centralize their conversations with customers from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Line, and WeChat into a single platform. The platform also offers marketing automation and chatbot solutions to make sellers' operations more efficient.

Competitive Landscape

The global chatbot market is highly competitive, owing to the presence of many small and large players. The market is concentrated with the key players adopting strategies, such as product innovation, to stay ahead of the competition. Some of the players in the market are IBM Corporation,eGain Corporation, Nuance Communications, Creative Virtual Ltd, and Avaamo Inc., among others.

• June 2022 - Serviceaide Inc. announced Automation 2.0 as part of a unified, portfolio-wide product upgrade across its full line of service management products, enabling the "shift-left" drive toward self-service and automation to be more accessible cost-effective across a wide range of enterprise and customer service and support scenarios.
• March 2022- Kore.ai, a significant enterprise conversational AI software platform and solutions provider, announced the debut of Health Assist, the first in a series of revolutionary, digital-first healthcare experiences, at the HIMSS global health conference and exhibition.

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• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
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