Algorithmic personality detection. Did you know that some life insurance underwriters are attempting to assess your personality — via your magazine and website subscriptions, the photos you post to social media, and more — in order to determine how risky an investment you are? Some lenders have used personality algorithms to predict your future financial transactions. (The data show that if you look at two people with the same professional and personal circumstances, the one with a higher college G.P.A. will be more likely to pay off a debt.) Algorithms will harness personal data in order to assess an employee’s predicted success at work: for example, how likely she is to bounce around jobs.

Bots. Software applications that run automated tasks are called “bots.” 2016 will bring a host of creative bots that will supercharge our productivity, keep us company, and help us track what others are doing. What’s new: you’ll have the opportunity to use and program them yourself. Microsoft’s experimental Mandarin-language bot, Xiaolce, is akin to Samantha in Her. She lives inside a smartphone and has intimate conversations with her users, because the program is able to remember details from previous conversations. She also mines the Chinese internet for human conversations in order to synthesize chat sessions.

Bots do more than offer conversation. News organizations will soon use bots to sort and tag articles in real time. We’ll see advanced bots manipulating social media and stocks simultaneously. The intelligence community might deploy bots for surveillance and for digital diplomacy. HR managers can use bots to train employees. Meantime, as Slack continues to grow in scale and popularity, bots within that environment will help automate meetings and status updates and so on, saving time and increasing productivity.

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