We are intrigued but skeptical about the use of chat bots for knowledge seeking. Instead of just conjecturing, we added this headfirst experiment to really see what we can do with this tech. The bot is still being worked on, here is an overview:

• Software: Zapier
• Cost: $0 for Zapier, 30 minutes of setup time [seriously!]. Costs will be incurred if we go above our 100 zaps a month in our account, each search is a 'zap', as well as any additional actions (like saving info to a table etc.). You could literally spend our money right now if you just like ask this thing 100s of questions (shhhh zapier has amazing controls in place so like, we would catch it pretty quick)
• Config: We used Zapier's new chat bot feature to spin up a chat bot that we pointed to a data source we are building out, related to tech terms that CEO's and leaders of small orgs should know more about, but there is a barrier of 'techy' language that is hard to understand. 
  
  • The chat bot uses Zapiers interfaces function to also capture a little bit of info about a user of the bot, and stores it in a Zapier table (web-based database similar to Airtable etc.). 

Goal: By the end of 2024 we hope to have all of our terms updated in the chat bot, so that the technical terms (already in place) will also be coupled with simplified definitions, visuals, and even more 'deep dive' or use case scenarios. 

Our why: Well we like to play wiht new toys, that's like half of it. But associations especially have thousands of resources they provide to members, and we are fascinated with upending the way members find that content. In other words, we want to help stop marketing and everyone-else-at-the-association for arguing what should be in the website drop down (there iwll never be a config that helps your members find everything!), and makes finding those resources super fast and fun. 

Give Harrier1 a spin, let us know your thoughts!

Using slack for keeping all of our outside parties organized, and we turned on the Hubspot chat integration feature in Slack. Here is what we found:

• Software: Hubspot integration for Slack (available in Slack app store)
• Cost: $0, as far as we can tell. 
• Config: Literally just turned it on and let it authenticate
• Features: Search/Create Tasks, Search/Create Tickets, Search/Create Companies, Search/Create Contacts, Search/Create Deals, Convert Slack Messages to HubSpot Notes

Review: Often times, integrations of this nature are less than helpful, and I always feel like the try and do too much. This one doesn't feel complex, but a number of features (quickly creating contacts etc.) aren't primary strategies for our site.  It worked great upon addition to my slack app space, but it has been less reliable with pretty sizeable time gaps from when a chat is entered in the chatbot on our Hubspot site, for example, it should be instantaneously pushed to Slack.   See images below: