Robots will replace customer service agents – thank god for that

Just this week, American fast food chain Taco Bell announced the TacoBot, which you can text via the Slack messaging app. You can use the bot to order food for yourself or a group of friends or co-workers, ask for recommendations and pay for it through Slack. As an executive said at the launch: "TacoBot is the next best thing to having your own Taco Bell butler…and who wouldn't want that?" You can order Domino's pizza through Amazon's AI assistant Echo (which hasn't made its way to the UK yet), and multinationals like Unilever and BMW use a simple Q&A bot that can answer any question a customer services employee would. The Henn-na hotel, which opened in Nagasaki, Japan last summer, is the world's first hotel to be fully staffed by robots – from check-in staff, to porters and the concierge.