Routine tasks kill productivity and creativity. It's an obvious fact, but if you need proof, there are stats showing that people spend up to 80 percent of their average workday on activities of little to zero value. How can organizations solve the problem? Incorporating chatbots is one of the most innovative and effective answers. When Merge Queue, or MQ for short, joined one of our projects, we all felt relieved.

The Age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us! So will you lose your job in 2017? Man the photon torpedos and tune your dilithium crystals because sales 3.0 or even 4.0 is upon us. AI is steadily creeping into sales assistants that loop into Slack Bots to sync to Salesforce like Troops.ai. You can even deploy a virtual sales assistant that schedules meetings for you (x.ai)!

HubSpot Live Chat: Messages is a live chat tool built for sales teams. You can use it to optimize your website by identifying users' most commonly asked questions and collecting feedback. Repeat incoming chats are routed to the same sales rep to build better relationships. Plus, all conversations are automatically synced to the contact's timeline on the CRM, making it easy to schedule follow-up tasks, emails and calls. Facebook Messenger bots: if your business is active on social media, chances are a bot will help collapse the sales process.

If you're involved in marketing, you must be somewhat familiar with both artificial intelligence and social media. Both technologies are significantly impacting the world of marketing. Gone are the days when businesses only focused on pamphlets, TV ads, newspaper ads, and other forms of traditional advertising methods. Marketing is one of the fields that is highly impacted by technology and changes in the world. A marketer needs to be updated with the latest trends and technologies to keep on performing.

Having processed nearly three billion messages at Dashbot, we've taken an updated look at the most popular, and sometimes not so popular, messages users send to Facebook bots. Hi and Hello are still the most popular messages. Each month, more than 60 percent of bots receive the message "hi" -- in April it was 60.2 percent, March 61.5 percent, February 67.4 percent, and January 65.3 percent. Despite "hi" being a common message, not all bots support it still. We had a meet-up recently where we entered "hi" into one of the demo bots, and the response was "Sorry, not sure what you mean."

The app boom is over. There are now more than 4.2 million apps available for Android and iOS, but three-quarters of American smartphone users download a grand total of zero new apps per month. They might be mostly free and easy to access, but apps are struggling to make it on to our phones and tablets. According to comScore, we spend the majority of our screen time using just three apps, with the average American spending almost half their time in just one. With the eyeballs of the world glued to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, developers have started turning once-simple chat apps into complex ecosystems. And at the centre of this change is a horde of subservient bots. You've just walked into your kitchen after a long week. "Play Etta James," you say.

For my Insight Data Science project, I built a linear regression model to predict nightly tap room attendance for New Republic Brewing Co. Using this model, New Republic will be able to schedule the appropriate number of bartenders for any given night. When it came time to decide how I would deliver this model to New Republic, I decided to eschew the typical dashboard in favor of building a Slack bot. New Republic had recently switched from communicating through Google Hangouts to Slack because they wanted to take advantage of Slack's integrations, so I took this opportunity to explore Slack integration creation. Building a Slack bot to interact with the model has many advantages. It provides a user friendly interface to the model that allows anyone at New Republic to interact with it.