What are the plans to add bots to Yammer?

[Karl Brooks]

Athens Airport has become the first airport worldwide to implement a bot app through Facebook Messenger
“The bots are programs that perform a specific task in an automated manner where human intervention is not necessary. It is an application that will revolutionize the way we use our smartphones because the more it evolves, the more it reduces the use of many different applications, as with a single command we will be able to perform everything we want via Facebook Messenger.”

We have a lot of Problem Solving (Q&A) type groups that would benefit from adding a bot ... So are there any plans to introduce bots to Yammer?

[#2]

Google has Allo. https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/18/google-allo-chat-app/

[#3]

What would be an example of something that would be great for Yammer to have a bot to do?

Right now there is Flow, which has powerful tie-ins to Yammer to do automated things.  And with the REST API, you can also do some advanced things as well.  I don't have much experience using PowerApps, but since Flow is so powerful with Yammer, I'm sure that PowerApps is more so.

[#4]

What Facebook are doing with Messenger is making it so that you don't have to leave Messenger in order to interact with a company, and then bots allow that interaction to be automated from the company's side.

So replicating that in Yammer, you wouldn't have to leave Yammer in order to interact with your company, and then bots allow that interaction to be automated.

I'm at Heathrow Airport, we have mobile apps that inform staff of arrival / departure times for flights ... the bot would allow them to access that information in Yammer, which might then spark a discussion if say, a flight is arriving early or another one is leaving late or an arriving flight has been given a priority landing slot ... possibly requiring a cross-departmental cross-company (thinking external group) team to dynamically swarm around whatever the issue is.