The Robo-Powered Internet

Kik Messenger is a huge hit with teens - and a sudden threat to Facebook in the race to create the world’s mobile operating system. The company’s 28-year-old founder thinks his bots give him the edge.

- Parmy Olson

In one of the classier restaurants of Waterloo, Ontario, a university town covered in piles of snow one January afternoon, I open Kik Messenger, one of the most popular chat apps in North America among teenagers, and scan a code on the wall. A new conversation pops up in the app. “Welcome to the Bauer Kitchen! What can I get you?” Suggested answers hover over my keyboard, and I tap, “Order drinks.” It writes back: “Please type your drink order below.” “Diet Coke,” I type, dropping the pleasantries I’d normally use with a human server. Minutes later, a waitress comes by, and instead of asking what I want, puts down a tall, dark glass of fizz and ice.

It felt a bit like the first time I tapped a button and an Uber car appeared three minutes later—the magic of what many in the tech industry call online-to-offline, the ability to order physical products or services from an app. Except now you don’t even need a new app—you can just chat your way to a richer life.

The golden era of mobile apps is already over. Americans have been downloading zero of them per month on average. Most of us have all the apps we need and have narrowed our use down to a few messaging and social networking services. So, instead of wasting thousands of dollars pushing an app on an unwilling public, businesses like Bauer Kitchen are taking their business to services such as Kik, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp that their customers are already using to text.