This is not just about automating mundane tasks as much as it is about creating a world where 40% of jobs require a human touch. It’s creating a world with more opportunities so that our children can flourish.
Fifty or sixty years ago, the number of jobs that required creativity was as low as one percent. And now it is roughly four percent. Almost all the jobs that your readers have, as well as everybody here at Automation Anywhere, they didn’t exist before – they’ve all been created in the last half century.
I feel very passionate about this; as a parent we tell our children that they can do anything, which is what I tell my daughters all the time. But what does it mean ‘they can do anything?’ When there are only four percent of jobs that require some amount of creativity, how can they expect that they will be lucky enough to find one of those jobs? Is that world good enough for our children? I envision a world where at least 40 percent of jobs require some amount of creativity.
This is not just about automating mundane tasks as much as it is about creating a world where 40 percent of jobs require a human touch. It’s creating a world with more opportunities so that our children can flourish.
They deserve better than what we had and the younger generations will demand it. Most young people don’t have an interest in doing what my parents or I did. We did whatever we had to, no matter how mundane it was. That was the world I grew up in. The younger generations have no such interest. They grew up differently.
They grew up with different tools and experiences and they say, ‘I want a career, I don’t want a job’. I want meaningful work. I want to do something that creates impact in the world that I live in. How can that be achieved if they have to go into jobs with mundane, repetitive work?
If we can automate those tasks, we free up our younger generations to be creative and find careers where they are fulfilled. That’s my vision. That’s what automation is about and that’s what we are doing here at Automation Anywhere.
The question of displacing and impacting workers has been asked many times – the first time somebody asked the question was in 1777. Since then, it’s been discussed and debated a hundred times over and every time we get it wrong. Various magazine covers have declared that it’s the end of the ‘job market’ as we know it and yet today there are more high paid jobs than at any other time in history.
Workers who operate alongside bots never want to go back to doing things the old way. I’ve walked the floors and asked thousands of customers if they would go back and the answer is universally, never. Ask yourself this; if you could go back to being 20 again and start your career over, would you look for a job that involved mundane work like order processing or data entry? Or would you want to work at a company where you could be creative and do meaningful work with all the repetitive tasks taken care of for you?
That’s why employees who have experience with bots command higher wages and why employers with bots are more attractive to the younger generations.
Although most people talk about lower-end tasks, the reality is many of the highest paid jobs involve mundane work. Our customers in hedge funds employ some of the highest paid people on the planet and they are automating processes to free up traders and analysts to do the work that they are expert at rather than trawling though data.
We are also working with the medical profession on various drug research projects that are resulting in drug availability being accelerated by automation. RPA is not just a tool to eradicate the prosaic nature of repetitive tasks, it is able to set people free to accomplish things that were previously out of reach or at least very hard to come by.
One of the key considerations for an RPA strategy is to ensure that the process is optimized before it is automated. Using RPA to manage legacy processes which are not entirely performant will only derive minimal value – you may get better at doing something badly. RPA must be seen as a component of digital strategy rather than a silver bullet to resolve productivity issues so implementing bots in silos to perform isolated tasks will only ever take you so far.
As Holger Mueller eloquently notes in his piece on ‘automation and the sentient enterprise’ elsewhere in this issue of ERP Today, “CxO's need to realise that RPA is a key step towards enterprise acceleration, but it’s not the final destination.
Discovery Bot accelerates the automation journey for organisations using artificial intelligence to automatically capture and analyse user actions to determine what business processes to automate. Then, with a single click, it can create a software bot. This is a vision we’ve had for years – a bot being able to create another bot.