A.I., bot, or digital assistant. No matter what you call it, all tech giants are now developing, improving, or promoting their own applications capable of answering your questions, scheduling your meetings, or playing your favorite playlist.

We’ve all asked Siri a question or seen how Alexa responds to commands in commercials, but what are the business uses for these and other applications like them?

Businesses are already using bots to take food and e-commerce orders and to provide basic customer service. Other bots are automating parts of the sales and hiring process or allocating resources to projects. As this technology continues to advance, so will the use cases for the bots.

One of the biggest limitations of digital assistants in their current form is that they interpret the request and outsource task execution to a connected agent or bot. While this opens the assistant up to be more nimble and complete more tasks, it also increases the likelihood that the assistant will outsource the task to the wrong connected application or be unable to complete a request if multiple applications are required to execute the task. Developers are now working to help the assistants better understand language so they can more accurately outsource to the correct connected application.

Whether you’re afraid of AI taking over the world or excited to have your digital assistant reliably schedule a meeting for you, these applications are becoming one of the pieces of technology receiving the most development attention.