(Presented by Mark Watson) You don’t need to understand Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Machine Learning (ML) to build a bot. I have found that developing bots can be an extremely rewarding experience as often times you can develop a fully functioning bot in a few days or even a few hours. In this talk I’ll show you how to build simple request/response based bots using different bot platforms, like Slack and Twilio with no dependencies on AI, NLP, or ML. I’ll discuss different strategies and backend architectures to support these simple bots. From there we’ll move onto more interactive bots. I’ll show you how you can develop interactive Slack bots and discuss how the backend architecture changes to support these types of bots. Finally, I’ll show you how you can add natural language processing to improve your interactive bot without having to be an expert in NLP, AI, or ML.