Juicebox, a US-based sex and relationship coaching app, launched Slutbot: a text-message chatbot that helps users hone their sexting skills. Unveiled this month, Slutbot offers a realistic sexting experience to demonstrate how to talk dirty, maintain the mood, and establish consent with a partner. Slutbot’s gender identity can be customized, and users can also customize the gender identity they will inhabit during the conversation. The free-to-use bot was developed by erotic fiction authors and sex educators.

It’s been three years since chatbots learned how to overturn our parking tickets. It’s about time they learned how to sext! Here are two SFW takeaways.

Skills economy. Two powerful human needs lie at the heart of this innovation. The first is, ahem, obvious. The second is the need for self-improvement. Slutbot is a reminder of the ever-present yearning for new skills and knowledge in every domain of life. Okay, you’re (probably) not going to start teaching people how to sext. But what skills, knowledge and expertise reside inside your organization? How can you develop innovative new channels that can empower consumers to access those skills in 2020?

Virtual companions. There are concerns that digital technologies – including virtual conversational agents – are alienating us from each other. And hey, this guy married an actual hologram. But what about virtual companions that don’t pull users away from real relationships, and instead help bring people closer together? Slutbot falls in that category, and so does the previous IoTD example The Perfect Candidate, a ‘virtual politician’ that helped Australians learn about their fellow citizens. Could you deploy a virtual companion that helps customers improve their real-world relationships?