Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years, because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud.

The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.

Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.