MyKAI is retiring. KAI-powered bots are propagating.

We’ve decided to retire MyKAI, our consumer banking bot. This is the consumer banking bot we built with our conversational KAI platform, KAI Banking. Way back on June 28, 2016, we launched Kai out into the world and made it available for free to any consumer with US bank accounts and credit cards. It was one of the very first banking bots on Facebook Messenger. 

Those were the early days of banking bots and virtual assistants – third-party messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger were only starting to offer public APIs.  When it launched, MyKAI was one of the very first banking bots and definitely the most comprehensive financial bot, offering informational and transactional banking capabilities on Facebook Messenger, Slack and SMS.

A lot has happened since then. Kai got smarter every day while we applied our AI training and sophisticated machine learning. We launched new features and as the Facebook Messenger platform matured. We added rich media, visual elements, carousels, quick reply buttons, and more. What never changed was how easily MyKAI helped people manage their money, track transactions, get insights into spending, and pay people – all via human-like conversations.

We had two goals for MyKAI. One, create a direct, quick feedback loop with the consumer to improve the Kai experience and learn from their behaviors. Two, showcase how banks can use our conversational AI platform to design and deploy entirely new banking experiences in the real world.

Our team’s hands-on, production experience using our own KAI Banking helped us improve our platform, including the pre-packaged banking knowledge, the tools to collect, train and integrate data, and the self-service customer portal to measure results and improve the experience.

Now that KAI is the leading conversational AI platform, available to millions of users in production around the globe, in multiple languages and across various channels, this journey is complete. Consumers now have plenty of opportunities to engage with KAI through their own bank’s KAI-powered assistant or bot.

We are grateful to the consumers that chatted with Kai, trusted Kasisto, and gave us immeasurable feedback. We are constantly using these learnings to make KAI better at some of the world’s most innovative banks.