The fourth industrial revolution is happening now where new technology brings new possibilities – and new challenges for rethinking the workplace as we know it, says Kit Cox
The future of work will mean humans and robots working together.
We’re living through the fourth industrial revolution in which breakthroughs in robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) will put technology at the heart of everything we do. As such, businesses of all sizes are starting to realise the potential of automation for competitive advantage – and for driving business value.
As emerging categories have been spawned (and the first ‘bot’ billionaires crowned), some of the fastest-growing enterprise software in the world grips our collective future in the workplace. Automation and the introduction of artificial intelligence will drastically change how we work – and it’s already happening.
Automation – it’s not what you think
The McKinsey Global Institute has predicted automation will have the economic impact of $5-7 trillion by 2025, second only to mobile internet technology in terms of its potential impact.
When you think of automation, you might think of android or humanoid robots taking over our own swivel-chair positions in open-plan offices across the world. Media rhetoric about automation making high numbers of jobs redundant is rife. It’s not as simple as technology replacing humans. How we approach work will completely change.
The most common starting point for businesses embracing new technology is with very simple, rule-based task automation called Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA is the fastest-growing enterprise software in the world. According to research firm Gartner Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software spending is on pace to total $2.4 billion in 2022. By the end of 2022, 85% of large and very large organisations will have deployed some form of RPA. So, we’ll all be very familiar with its presence before long.
RPA’s growth trajectory impact
The number of companies using automation has doubled since last year (according to Deloitte’s latest report, from 4% in 2018 to 8% this year). Deloitte predicts automation will increase workforce capacity by 27% by 2022.
David Wright, Partner at Deloitte, explains: ‘Automation has been at the top of the business agenda for many years, promising to boost productivity, cut costs and redefine the role of the worker. It is exciting to see that the technology is finally being embraced in a sizeable way, but there is now an urgent need for leaders to address the impact it will have on the workforce. A lot more thought needs to be given to the integration of humans and machines and the new roles that will be created.’
Wright adds: ‘It’s often anticipated that the rise of automation will result in a swathe of job cuts, but our research shows the opposite. While new roles will be created to work in tandem with machines, there will be a greater demand for more strategic and creative thinking which only humans can bring. Automation will amplify the workforce’s intelligence, not mute it. Humans are creative, strategic, tactical and inventive. Robots are better suited to tasks that humans find difficult and dislike.’
With the adoption of automation technology, other transformative technology will follow – such as natural language processing, cognitive and machine learning. Human employees will be liberated to follow more creative and innovative work, which, often, will be at the crux of providing a better customer experience as part of delivering a business service through an end-to-end process.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is all in the distant future
Analysts are hailing 2020 as the ‘breakout year’ for big organisational change charged by technology adoption.
Justin Watson, global robotic and intelligent automation leader at Deloitte, explains: ‘[The year] 2020 looks to be a breakout year for intelligent automation, as organisations combine robotic process automation with artificial intelligence and other technologies to enable new ways of working. By doing so, automations go beyond the routine to the innovative, from collecting and processing data to predicting, analysing and making contextual decisions.
‘Organisations that reimagine how they work, take advantage of a combination of human and machine workforces, and have the skills and knowledge to harness intelligent automation will be best placed to take advantage of the opportunities the technologies promise.’
Reimaging how organisations work means completely rethinking how departments are structured.
Analyst Craig Le Clair from Forrester said in a report: ‘Central control of robots has become a focus area […] As the market matures, features like end-to-end visibility for robots […] become a focus […]. Proper governance blurs human and robot treatment.’
If humans and digital workers are treated as a central pool of resources, skills and competencies, then the traditional siloed departmental structure will fall away. The workplace of the future will be project-based, centrally managed with deep insight and complete oversight, fluid and focused on goal business goals – like improving customer experience.
Augmented reality
Analyst firm Gartner refers to augmented reality ‘augmented intelligence’. Gartner defines augmented intelligence as a human-centered partnership model of people and AI working together to enhance cognitive performance. This includes learning, decision making and new experiences.
‘Augmented intelligence is all about people taking advantage of AI,’ says Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner. ‘As AI technology evolves, the combined human and AI capabilities that augmented intelligence allows will deliver the greatest benefits to enterprises.’
According to Gartner, AI augmentation will create $2.9 trillion of business value in 2021 and lead to an increase of 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity, globally. The greatest benefits will be business decision support and human augmentation to improve customer experience.
By 2030, decision support/augmentation will surpass all other types of AI initiatives to account for 44% of the global AI-derived business value, says Gartner.
Build a human-centered business
The potential is real: research published last year by a team led by Chris Brauer at Goldsmiths, University of London, showed that organisations ‘augmented’ by automation technologies are 33% more likely to be human-friendly, and have employees who are 31% more productive. ‘That an astonishing double-win: happier employees, assisted by technology to get a third more done with their time,’ comments Naomi.
In MIT’s latest report on the future of work, the School urges businesses to ‘redesign workflow and rethink the division of tasks between workers and machines, akin to what occurred as Amazon deployed robotics in its warehouses. The resulting changes in work design will alter the nature of many jobs, in some cases profoundly.’
The workforce of the future
Technology will force us to rethink job roles according to skill and competency rather than by function alone. The opportunity to reap the benefits of new technology, to scale new heights of business productivity, efficiency and customer experience will depend on our human choices as business leaders to reshape the future of work rather than the technology alone. The future of work is a choice rather than an inevitability. And businesses will either fail or thrive at the hands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The building blocks of the new workforce
Think of all the different skills your business requires to deliver a complete service. Let’s say a customer requested some information about an online order. Your employees would need a range of skills and competencies from reading and understanding the email request, manually checking and updating a database, having a conversation and solving problems to provide a good customer experience.
Imagine all those skills can be represented by different colour toy building bricks to create a model of your process. RPA can replace ‘skill’ bricks relating to following basic rules (reading, copying and clicking). But, if you remove and replace one brick from within an entire model, it’s likely you’ll weaken – or even break – the overall structure.
There’s also the challenge of ensuring all the different ‘tasks’ involved in delivering a process are completed seamlessly in sync with all your different technologies – alongside clunky legacy systems – and have oversight of all the workers involved. Without overarching governance and workflow, RPA will merely deliver sub-processes within a service slightly more efficiently. Then, every time a process or technology changes, there’s greater complexity and risk. Businesses need a base plate to build the blocks of the future of work upon. Enate is a service orchestration platform that orchestrates work between humans and digital workers to make sure the right work gets to the right worker at the right time. Customers can plug and play any vendor technology – without complex technical integration – and keep a human in the loop.
Kit Cox is an automation and software engineering expert, entrepreneur and the CEO and Founder of Enate – a service orchestration SaaS platform.
