Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: business

  • Could a robot put you out of business?

    Could a robot put you out of business?

    Transaction based businesses are in the firing line as robots and algorithms are taking over the tasks that are the mainstay of many service businesses.

    In How To Know if a Robot Will Take Your Marketing Job, Gartner consultant Martin Kihn identifies two factors that indicate roles at risk of being overtaken by technology.

    “The two dimensions relate to the things computers do best: (1) repetitive tasks, and (2) structured data,” states Kihn. “If you’re a knowledge worker, your biggest enemy is routine. To the extent your work is predictable, it’s codable . . . and you’re a target.”

    Kihn describes a curve where repetitive, structured jobs are at risk of automation while at the other end are more abstract analytic roles which are relatively safe from the algorithms and robots.

    will-a-robot-take-your-job

    While Kihn is focusing on marketing jobs, his message is clear for all occupations and businesses – if your company makes most of its revenue from low skill, easily automated tasks then it is ripe for being overtaken by algorithms or robotics.

    Even for businesses that are higher up the value chain, there are roles that can be replaced within the enterprise; a good example are the mining companies replacing high paid drivers with automated pit trucks.

    There are even many management jobs that may be affected as artificial intelligence advances. Approving spending or hiring requests for example can be largely dealt with by algorithms with only the rare exceptional case requiring a manager to intervene.

    So the executive suite may well be just as vulnerable as the lower status roles in an organisation.

    MIT professor Andrew McAfee who Kinh quotes has been clear that we’re on the cusp of massive change in the workplace as robots, algorithms and artificial intelligence progress. It may well be there are far more jobs and businesses at risk than we think.

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  • Artificial meat and disruption of the cattle market

    Artificial meat and disruption of the cattle market

    In thirty years ‘cultured meat’ will be commonplace and it will disrupt the cattle market Professor Mark Post warned the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association earlier this week.

    Artificial, or ‘cultured’, meat is a dramatic change for the food industries and it promises, or threatens, to radically transform the cattle grazing business.

    This is another example of an industry that wasn’t expected to be affected by change facing a radical transformation. It shows again few of us are immune from change.

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  • Beating Facebook envy

    Beating Facebook envy

    Do economies and businesses need to be at the cutting edge of tech or is staying behind the early adopters the key to get the most out of technology?

    “Everybody has Facebook envy,” says Oracle’s Neil Mendelson, the company’s Vice President for Big Data, about business life in Silicon Valley.

    Mendelson was talking about how the Silicon Valley business environment is a high pressure bubble where the focus on shipping products is different from the needs of users outside the tech sector.

    “The farther out you go from Silicon Valley the more people fundamentally understand the value is in getting something out of it,” says Mendelson who was speaking at an executive lunch in Sydney earlier today.

    “Being a late follower has an advantage because companies aren’t going to get fired up about this Facebook envy trying to assemble a solution but rather they can get something out of the cloud that will deliver value.”

    The Minitel problem

    An example of being too far ahead could be Minitel, a text based network operating across France between 1982 and 2012.

    Minitel was a visionary project intended to deliver services similar to the Internet through a dedicated terminal, however the open nature of the net made the French service less than attractive and eventually France Telecom wound the service up in 2012 as user interest evaporated.

    How much the French bet on Minitel held the nation’s digital economy back is open to question, the World Economic Forum lists France as 25th in the world in its 2014 Networked Readiness Index however the gap between most of the top nations is quite close.

    Falling off the bleeding edge

    The idea that the best return on a tech investment is by being behind the ‘bleeding edge’ isn’t new, for years the advice from serious computer experts was to never buy a Microsoft product until version three came out however there is a risk that the early adopters might get an early advantage over the slow movers.

    Another risk is missing out altogether; as Oracle’s Australian manager Tim Endrick told the room, “our experience is organisations are doing two things; they are either managing disruption and/or they are leveraging their structures to innovate. Those who are sitting on the back step doing nothing are in serious trouble.”

    So while there are risks with being too an early an adopter of new technology, it’s important to be aware of the trends and tools that are changing business.

    With the pace of change in both technology and industry accelerating, it may be that staying too far behind the cutting edge risk falling off altogether. Maybe it’s worth being envious of Facebook.

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  • Are brands doomed?

    Are brands doomed?

    A few days ago we covered the Great Transition research paper by Colonial First State Funds Management’s James White and Stephen Halmarick and followed up with a piece in Business Spectator looking at the ramifications for the Australian economy.

    One of Halmarick and White’s assertions is that brands are dead as consumers in emerging economies don’t care about corporate names and in developed nations people have better information about local businesses.

    The former argument seems flawed from the beginning; Apple for example is making huge inroads in China while local manufacturers like Lenovo, Huawei, Great Wall and Haier are all working hard to establish their names in international markets.

    In developed markets, White and Halmarick’s views have more basis with brand names not having the cachet they once did now consumers have a global platform to voice complaints and find alternatives.

    A good example of brands that are struggling are companies like Microsoft and McDonalds, although in the case of both companies this could be more because of a shift in the marketplace rather than better informed consumers.

    However brands are surviving as they lift their game and adapt to changed marketplaces, in fact its possible to argue that today’s consumers are more responsive to brand names than ever in the past.

    A good example of this is again Apple which has more fans than ever before. Apple are also a good example of how big corporations can invest huge amounts into new technologies and products to give them an advantage over upstarts.

    We should also remember that brands as we currently know them are largely a Twentieth Century phenomenon born out of the development of mass media communications and many of today’s household names came into the culture thanks to television in the 1950s and 60s.

    So as creatures of last century’s media it’s not surprising that brands are having to evolve to a changed world, some of them will thrive and grow while others will shrivel away.

    It’s safe to say though that the concept of brands isn’t dead, although many of the names we know today may not exist by the end of the decade.

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  • Managing the great transition

    Managing the great transition

    At present the global economy is beset with low expectations; trade is at its lowest point in 20 years, many of the worlds economies are teetering on the edge of depression and investment is barely keeping ahead of depreciation.

    The world is slowing and The Great Transition report by Colonial First State Global Asset Management looks at the reasons and some of the effects of this change.

    Senior economic and market research analyst James White suggests in the report that the current state of affairs is a permanent shift as global productivity rises due to Chinese production and the widespread digitisation of most industries.

    Compounding the problem in White’s view is the traditional measures of economic growth understates the size of the service economy as between ten and twenty percent of transactions go through the ‘black economy’ in most countries.

    In looking at their own field, the Colonial First State researchers suggest that investment strategies are going to change as ‘capital light’ industries begin to dominate advanced economies.

    While White and his co-author Stephen Halmarick are optimistic about what the changes mean and suggest a focus on people and attracting global capital as the key to competing during the Great Transition, the challenge is on policy makers to increase human capital in their economies.

    The question though is what can individual countries do to be competitive in this context? While nations like Switzerland and Singapore can quickly develop pro-investment policies, it’s harder for larger and more diverse societies.

    Perhaps the services driven economic model is really only one for high wealth, small nations with well trained and skilled workforces? If that’s the case, then the Great Transition might be a tough time for many of the world’s developed economies.

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