Can you afford for your business not to be on the Google Assistant Network?

Remember when you were looking around for your web domain name, even your business name? Finding out that someone else was sitting on that bloomin domain? Well, there is a new challenge that is happening quietly now, but the chances are that many have already lost out. Have you?

Google Assistant. You know that virtual assistant that you talk to on a phone or through a smart speaker like their Google Home mini devices; has grown up. There are now over 500 million devices enabled for this assistant, so that is a few and the opportunity to get your business on this network is available.

You are thinking, I am not sure I want to use this for my business, it is not on my strategy. Yeh, I get that, but in Google’s own words, if you want your business or app to be directly contactable via the Assistant then you need to “get in early”.

What? Why? Hold on what are you talking about?

Well if you register with the Google Assistant network then your customer can ask Google for you directly. OK Google, talk to Disruption Works [OR of course your name or address] … you then get YOUR business’ chatbot/assistant/app immediately and you are now talking directly to your customer. Powerful stuff.

There is a catch though and this is where business needs to act. These names or addresses are totally unique to the first person that registers their application. That is across the whole world and across that language.

So if you want “OK Google, talk to the Business Network”. Tough luck. That is now gone, but it is generic enough to now be a powerful name for that business network; who happens to be a client.

There are no derivations like .co.uk or .com and I expect we don’t want a phrase that is Hey Google talk to Business Hyphen Network!

Why should this be on your radar?

Are recent study showed that 20% of brands will have dumped their mobile apps by 2019, for the simple reason that they are not getting engagement and downloads. So the smart investment is in the channels that are already in use. Companies cannot hope to get 500 million downloads of their app. They would be pretty big for that to happen. Oh wait, yes Google are huge and it is not downloads it is everywhere. Google assistant is built into phones, cars, TV, smart home everything, so the potential to be part of that network is just mammoth.

The investment is now going on communicating through these large networks like Google Assistant and Facebook, WeChat and the like. So here is the chance to get your feet wet.

So can you afford it?

Well, hopefully so. The proverbial toe in the water would set back a business just £500 at the moment. So it is not something that needs to attract much risk to act now, but can mean a real difference later on.