What started as a meeting of 30 industry and thought leaders in San Francisco last winter, has grown and expanded to New York within the past year. Now, for the first time, Botness is going international and coming to Montreal.

Starting today and continuing through tomorrow, Botness is two days of panels, roundtables, and discussion focused around the creation and multi-uses of bots.

“After our inaugural events’ success we went on to host larger events in San Francisco and New York in late 2016 and early 2017 and always wanted to bring Botness international. As Automat is the only non-US headquartered organizer of Botness, Montreal was a logical choice,” Andy Mauro, co-founder and CEO at Automat.ai told MTLinTECH.

Speakers include Jean-François Gagné from Element AI, Amir Shevat from Slack, Bill Bliss from Microsoft, Guillaume Chalifoux from GSOFT, and Ian Cairns from Twitter, just to name a few.

“Botness goes back to the winter of 2016 when about 30 of us got together at Slack HQ in San Francisco at the behest of Amir Shevat, who leads developer relations at Slack and has been a big bot evangelist over the past year and a half. That first meetup included Lili Cheng, who leads the bot program at Microsoft, Chris Messina who coined the term conversational commerce, Jeff Lawson the CEO of Twilio, former Evernote CEO Phil Libin, and famed publisher Tim O’Reilly, all of whom who have gone on to be involved in the bot space in some way.”

Today is the day! See you all in a few hours for the 1st day of #BotnessMTL #Botness @andymauro @gleuch @kvgauthier @etiennemerineau

— Automat (@automat_inc) September 6, 2017

Also present were two home-grown startups, Automat.ai and Smooch.

Botness is part of an attempt to create an industry consortium consisting of platform providers along with companies building on those platforms in order to better ensure that bots gain widespread adoption and commercial success.

“We look to the community, all of whom are leaders in their companies and the bot or AI field at large, to decide on content. We almost always get updates from the major platform companies, all of whom are in attendance (Facebook, Google, Slack, Kik, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon), as well as dig into recent advancements in conversational user interface design. And we usually dig into some business oriented topics, which this year includes fundraising both from the investor and startup perspective, as well as a customer panel with companies who are actively working on chatbots.”

Since artificial intelligence (AI) is a core technological facet of chatbots, AI will be addressed as well.

Botness is free and starts at noon today. You can still register here.