Quora’s Poe: Making Marketers sit up and pay attention to conversations about their Brands

Quora's new AI chatbot app, Poe, which stands for "Platform for Open Exploration," is now available to the general public. It allows users to ask questions and receive responses from a variety of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other companies such as Anthropic.

Poe's mobile app was first announced by Quora in December, but it required an invite to try it out. With the app's recent public release, anyone can now use it. For the time being, it is only available to iOS users, but Quora says it will be available on other platforms in a few months.

POE serves as an aggregator for several AI-powered chatbots as an independent product of Quora, a social question and answer website. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, the company claims that Poe's content will eventually help to evolve Quora itself.

The goal of launching a POE-like platform is to provide users with a single, easy-to-use interface. Companies are working to develop various AI solutions that are tailored to their capabilities, but these may not adequately address all user needs. POE aims to bridge this divide by serving as a common platform for all.

The Q&A platform also revealed that they are working on an application programming interface that will allow any AI developer to easily plug their model into Poe.

Poe includes some social components in addition to an easy way to ask questions of the AI bots. Readers can create a profile and follow others using the app. Users can choose to publish model output on their profiles, making it available to their followers. The best examples will also be made available to all Poe users via the app's feed, where others can like or re-post the chatbot Q&A session.

Marketers are drawn to Quora mainly to understand their customers. What kind of content are they engaging with? What questions are they asking? So, what does it reveal about what they are thinking and what they feel? Marketers can understand trends too – what people are most concerned about. Understand what the competitor is doing. What can you do to outsmart them? Free market research, as it were.

With an AI-powered chat in the mix, marketers must ensure that their digital presence across the web is pristine and conveys exactly what they wish to communicate by way of Brand messaging - because that is where the bots will glean the information from.

And regardless of AI-powered bots answering questions about their brands, marketers must dive all in and answer them in the best way possible. Because, just like a human, the bot will learn as it goes along – and it is the marketer who must ensure that the AI will pick up the right information, presented in the best way possible.

Conversely, if a marketer sits back and relaxes thinking that anyway an AI-powered system will answer and respond to questions / queries / complaints, all will be lost.

Marketers need to stay alert and bring their A-game on!