This year at the LavaCon conference in Las Vegas, I followed some very exciting presentations about the very near future role of bots (software robot/intelligent agent) in our efforts to bring exactly the right piece of content to the right person, at the right time.

Current prominent bot examples are Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and IBM’s Watson Virtual Agent.

Some excellent presentations also talked about the fact that bots need to have access to enormous amounts of rich, structured, modular content that is tagged with metadata. In other words, bots feed on rich structured content and they just cannot get enough of it.

So, if you want to have bots help your users, you had better get started improving your content by making it modular (one question >> one answer << one topic), taggable with rich structured metadata and machine-readable. The more structure and metadata you add to your content, the further away from the wastebasket it gets.

In many companies, the intranet is the wastebasket or the final resting place for content with no structure and no metadata – not even the author can find it again. Adding metadata and structure can transform the content, making it searchable, findable and eventually “bottable.”