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Satya Nadella: Software bots will be as big as mobile apps

Companies that want to give clients the best possible customer experience should build a bot, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Bots are software agents that can have conversations with customers or other bots and automate tasks such as hotel booking or order delivery. In the future, these bots will greatly simplify our dealings with businesses, he said. 

"Think of bots that you will build as the new websites or new mobile apps. Your customers will interact with your business through these bots," said Nadella, speaking today at the Microsoft Envision conference in New Orleans.

"This is a world that we are at the very beginning stages of. But we think it's going to be much more ubiquitous in terms of its deployment."

The ways these bots could ease interactions between customers and businesses was demonstrated by Lilian Rincon, group program manager for the communications platform Skype