So for the last few months we've been in the lab figuring out ways for teams to be able to order Taco Bell even more quickly to help them keep on keepin' on. And soon you'll be able to order Taco Bell whenever the mood strikes through the magic of artificial intelligence. From there connect your ta.co account, choose your pickup location and order up your favorite Taco Bell item. Think your Slack team is ready to contribute to TacoBot's artificial intelligence?

No matter how slammed, stressed, or on a roll you might be, no one should work hungry. So for the last few months we've been in the lab figuring out ways for teams to be able to order Taco Bell even more quickly to help them keep on keepin' on. Enter Slack, a company that is currently disrupting the workplace (in a very good way). Slack is a powerful messaging platform that makes working with groups better. The ultimate goal is to get you working less and living more so Slack made things like centralizing conversations, sharing files and communicating via GIFs way easier.

You can place an order with Domino's just by tapping an icon on your phone's home screen. Taco Bell is working on something a bit more engaging, and it's powered by artificial intelligence. They've got a new chat bot called TacoBot that's ready to serve hungry customers -- at least a select few beta testers who want to help them polish things up before TacoBot becomes a full-time employee. The goal isn't necessarily to make ordering as fast as possible, it's to bring a human touch back to the online ordering experience. Think of it as Siri or Cortana, but dressed in a Taco Bell uniform… and maybe not so much someone you'd go to for directions or for help laying out your schedule for the day.

Ever wished you could order Taco Bell for everyone in the office using a simple chat bot? No? Well, you'll soon be able to it anyway. Taco Bell has blessed the world with TacoBot, a chatbot for the popular workplace chat app Slack. Tell TacoBot what you want, and it keeps a running tally of your order, just like that screen at the drive-thru. When you're done, pay through TacoBot and pick up your order at the Nearest Participating Taco Bell.

Building technology companies worth tens of billions of pounds often requires one or two exceptionally talented individuals with strong computer science backgrounds and entrepreneurial spirits. Finding these people can be time consuming and difficult, which is why a couple of UK organisations have turned to artificial intelligence and software. In the last month, Founders Forum, a network of successful startup founders and business leaders, and company builder Entrepreneur First, have both revealed they are using artificial intelligence (AI) and custom-built software to identify the UK's most promising founders. Founders Forum, set up by serial entrepreneur and lastminute.com "An AI simulates what a human might do but at scale; with more data and no bias," said Dr Tom Bowles, data scientist and founder in residence at Founders Factory, a startup accelerator launched by Brent Hoberman.

JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY – With the push of a button, a perfectly healthy 34-year-old museum-goer named Ugo Dumont was transformed into a confused 85-year-old man with cataracts, glaucoma and a ringing in his ears known as tinnitus. Dumont had volunteered at Liberty Science Center on Tuesday to don a computer-controlled exoskeleton that can be remotely manipulated to debilitate joints, vision and hearing and shared with the crowd what aging feels like decades before his time. Headphones muffled his hearing while goggles left him with only peripheral vision due to macular degeneration while the suit's joints were adjusted to simulate the stiffness of rheumatoid arthritis. The 40-pound (18 kg) suit also gave Dumont a taste of the weight gain people typically experience as they age. "Wow," Dumont gasped as he struggled to walk on a treadmill facing a video titled "Walk on the Beach."

We've seen some clever ways to order food online in our day, but this one is decidedly off the wall. Taco Bell is testing TacoBot, a chat AI that helps you order (what else?) tacos in a Slack conversation. Think of it as a tasty text adventure -- you can ask questions about the menu, customize your order and check your cart. It's only in a private beta with a few companies at the moment, but you can sign up for a waiting list to have your Slack team give TacoBot a try. Just think -- you could have tacos sent your way while you're stuck in a planning session.

Emotional intelligence is a cornerstone of human interactions--an essential part of what it means to be human. But now, artificial intelligences are being developed to better read and process human emotions, which is already changing the way we interact with robots. In the early 1990s, psychologists Salovey and Mayer were the first to recognize emotional intelligence as a set of knowledge and skills distinct from other forms of intelligence, defining it as "the ability to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." Emotional intelligence is something that seems wonderfully and innately human. But it turns out the tenets of emotional intelligence--which we start picking up in infancy and which seem so closely linked to human nature itself--can be quantified and reduced to logical procedures and algorithms.

One of the most important things that ever happened to Dan Faggella was a collapsed roof. The then 25-year-old had been building his own business in his hometown of Wakefield, Rhode Island: a martial arts gym focusing on his specialty, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. "I was 17 or so when I first learned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and I really fell in love with the'chess game' aspect of the martial art," Faggella says. When his teacher's studio closed, he used the money he'd earned from teaching private lessons and working at a local beach to open his own studio, which grew from a rented space in someone else's gym to a 500-square-foot training area to 2,500 square feet of his own. At the same time, he was using his earnings from the studio to pursue what might seem like a very different path: a one-year Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under well-known author and positive psychology expert Martin Seligman.

Automation has infiltrated nearly every facet of our lives -- but in the realm of managing money, the robot invasion is a welcome technological development. Where traditional money managers rely on their individual expertise to pick and manage investments for client portfolios, a robo-advisor uses computer algorithms to scour the world of investment options, calculate all the possibilities, and curate the ideal mix of investments for investors. These automated investment services are built with the kind of technology that would make the geekiest mathlete salivate. But it's the seamless, easy-to-use interface that makes robo-investing an appealing option for investors looking for low-cost, easy ways to invest. In five years, assets under management by robo-advisors will increase 68 percent annually to about 2.2 trillion, according to consulting firm A.T. Kearney.