How your next CEO could be a robot

The path to management is changing as the connected workplace evolves, but it may well be the top jobs themselves will soon be automated.

“In 30 years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO,” Alibaba founder Jack Ma said told a technology conference in Zengzhou, China, last weekend.

One of the things underestimated about this wave of automation is how AI will be applied to management, Knowledge Management expert Euan Semple makes an important point how being supervised by a bot could be a lot fairer and transparent than human managers.

In the normal course of work many people don’t see much of their manager. Too often the experience is frustrating and unhelpful. The predictability and transparency of automated systems could potentially be fairer and more effective than an incompetent, prejudiced, or bullying manager.

The news for those looking at climbing the greasy management pole through getting professional qualifications isn’t good either, reports the BBC.

For the last fifty years, getting an accounting or law degree, often supplemented by an MBA, was the best path for a management position but shifting work patterns and technology is devaluing those qualifications while it’s appearing there will be less management positions anyway.

Tomorrow’s workplace is going to look very different to that of the past half century. Those of us currently in the workforce, as well today’s kids, need to be looking closely at the skills they have for a very different world.

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Crunching the middle classes

While the discussion around workplace automation has focused on ‘blue collar’ jobs, middle class occupations are those most likely to be affected in the near future.

This piece originally appeared in The Australian in July 2014. I’m republishing it here given the recent future of work related posts.

For the past four decades it’s been the working class that has suffered the brunt of the effects of globalisation and automation in the workforce. Now machines are taking middle class jobs, with serious implications for societies like Australia that have staked their future on white collar, knowledge-based service industries.

Yesterday, the Associated Press announced it was replacing business journalists with computer programs, following sports reporting where algorithms have delivering match reports for some years.

Some cynical media industry commentators would argue rewriting PR releases or other people’s stories — the model of many new media organisations — is something that should be done by machines. Associated Press’ management has come to the same view with business data feeds.

AP’s managing editor Lou Ferrara explained in a company blog post how the service will pull information out of company announcements and format them into standard news reports.

Ferrara wrote of the efficiencies this brings for AP: “Instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter.”

The benefit for readers is that AP can cover more companies with fewer journalists, the question is how many people can afford to read financial journals if they no longer have jobs?

Making middle managers redundant

Many of those fields that cheered the loss of manufacturing are themselves affected by the same computer programs taking the jobs of journalists; any job, trade or profession that is based on regurgitating information already stored on a database can be processed the same way.

For lawyers, accountants, and armies of form processing public servants, computers are already threatening jobs — as with journalism, things are about to get much worse in those fields, as mining workers are finding with automated mine trucks taking high-paid jobs.

Most vulnerable of all could well be managers; when computers can automate financial reports, monitor the workplace and make many day-to-day decisions then there’s little reason for many middle management positions.

Removing information gatekeepers

To make matters worse for white collar middle managers, many of their positions are only needed in organisations built around paper based communication flows; in an age of collaborative tools there’s no need to gatekeepers to control the movement of information to the executive suite.

Irish economist David McWilliams — his television series on the rise of the Celtic Tiger, The Pope’s Children, and the causes of the Global Financial Crisis, Follow The Money, are highly recommended viewing – last week suggested that the forces that disrupted the working classes in the 1970s and 80s are now coming for middle classes.

“The industrial class was undermined by both technological change and globalisation, but rather than lament this, many people who were unaffected by this social catastrophe labelled what happened from 1980 to 2010 as the “inevitable consequences” of global competition.” Mc Williams writes.

Those ‘inevitable consequences’ are now coming for the middle classes, asserts McWilliams.

On the right side of progress

While this is sounds frightening it may not be bad for society as whole; the Twentieth Century saw two massive shifts in employment — the shift from manufacturing to services in the later years, and the shift from agriculture to city-based occupations earlier in the century.

A hundred years ago nearly a third of Australians worked in the agriculture sector; today it’s three per cent. Despite the cost to regional communities, the overall economy prospered from this shift.

Answers in the makers movement

The question today though is what jobs are going to replace those white collar jobs that did so well from the 1980s? The Maker Movement may have answers for governments and businesses wondering how to adapt to a new economy.

Two weeks ago President Barack Obama welcomed several dozen leaders of America’s new manufacturing movement to a Maker Faire at the White House, where he proclaimed “Today’s DIY Is Tomorrow’s ‘Made in America'”.

In Singapore, the government is putting its hopes on these new technologies boosting the country’s manufacturing industry in one of the world’s highest-cost centres.

“The future of manufacturing for us is about disruptive technologies, areas like 3D printing, automation and robotics,” Singapore’s Economic Development Board Managing Director Yeoh Keat Chuan told Reuters earlier this year.

Britain too is experimenting with modern technologies, as the BBC’s World of Business reports about how the country is reinventing its manufacturing industry.

Tim Chapman of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre describes how the economics of manufacturing changes in a high-cost economy with a simple advance in machining rotor disks for Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines.

“These quite complex shaped grooves were taking 54 minutes of machining to make each of these slots. Rolls-Royce came to us and said can ‘can you improve the efficiency of this? Can you cut these slots faster?'”

“We reduced the cutting time from 54 minutes to 90 seconds.”

“That’s the kind of process improvement that companies need to achieve to manufacture in the UK.”

While leaders in the US, UK and Singapore ponder the future of manufacturing, Australian governments continue to have faith in their 1980s models of white collar employment — little illustrates how far out of touch the nation’s political classes are with reality when they proclaim Sydney’s future as an Asian banking centre or Renminbi trading hub.

Old business ideas

In the apparatchiks’ fevered imaginations this involves rooms full of sweaty white men in red braces yelling ‘buy’ into telephones as shown in 1980s Wall Street movies. In truth, the computers took most of those jobs two decades ago.

As McWilliams points out, the dislocations to the manufacturing industries of the 1970s and 80s were welcomed by those in the professions as the inevitable cost of ‘progress’.

Now progress might be coming for them. Our challenge is to make sure we’re on the right side of that progress.

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Mining for jobs in an automated future

Increasingly automated mines show how the jobs of the future don’t lie in old industries.

While politicians clamour to ‘bring jobs home’, automation is increasingly taking those jobs away with the mining industry being the best example.

In 2015, McKinsey looked at the effects of automation in various US industries and found the production component of mining could lose over 80% of its jobs in coming years.

In a piece for Diginomica this week, I looked at a case study featuring Western Australia’s Fortescue Metal Group (FMG) from the recent AWS Summit in Sydney.

Slashing costs

When Fortescue planned their Solomon groups of iron ore mines in the Pilbara region of North-Western Australia in 2010, they estimated 75 manned trucks would be needed. As it turned out they only needed 49 robotic vehicles.

The savings, both in capital expenditure and operational costs was substantial and the entire operation saw its costs nearly halved.

It’s not just trucks becoming autonomous, functions like drilling and explosives laying are also being automated reducing costs and risks even further.

Dashed hopes

So mining communities like those in the United States hoping Donald Trump will bring back prosperity or Australians who believe a billion dollar subsidy to an Indian coal mining company will guarantee jobs are doomed to disappointment.

A modern mine is likely to employ more workers in an office thousands of miles away than on the site itself. Where once the surrounding region would get hundreds of jobs from a large mine, today it’s only going to be a handful.

It isn’t just the mine workers themselves though, McKinsey’s study also forecast the mining industry’s administrative workforce could see 90% of jobs going while senior management had the potential of being 99% automated.

Beyond blue collar roles

That this wave of automation will affect ‘white collar’ jobs as much as trades or unskilled workers isn’t new – this piece in 2015 for The Australian described how many of the ‘knowledge economy’ jobs will soon be done by robots or artificial intelligence.

Mining is a good indicator of where technology and employment is heading. We, and our political leaders, are going to have to think carefully where the future jobs are coming from as they aren’t going to be found in resurrecting old industries.

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Beating the bots: The evolving call centre business

The evolution of the call centre may well be a pointer for other industries as we all grapple with the effects of automation.

The call centre business is very much an example of an industry driven by technological change, having only coming into being over the last 50 years as telecommunications became ubiquitous and affordable before being one of the biggest offshored industries.

In an age of artificial intelligence, web based help pages and chatbots, it’s easy to think the call centre era may be coming to a close but Acticall Sitel Group’s Australian and New Zealand managers Steve Barker, the regional Chief Operating Officer, and Sally Holloway, Director of Business Operations, believe the industry has a long way to go yet.

Miami based Acticall Sitel Group operates call centres in 22 countries with 75,000 ‘associates’ providing services to over 200 major companies so their view on how the industry is evolving is worth hearing.

Technological shifts

Naturally technology is the driving force with the increasing availability of broadband meaning more ‘associates’ can work from home rather than in call centres while cloud services are reducing the cost and complexity of call centres.

The work from home aspect is proving popular with their clients as well as businesses see retaining skilled staff and the expense of real estate driving many organisations to extend their programs. An interesting observation given IBM’s and Yahoo!’s moves in restricting home office options in recent times.

Social media has also changed the type of interactions consumers are having with organisations while artificial intelligence and robots – chatbots – are automating many call centre functions.

A broader industry

Holloway though says she doesn’t see voice services going away, “some interactions still require the personal touch”, but technology is broadening the ways customers interact with businesses.

Interestingly, both Holloway and Barker believe that the commoditization of call centres is over as companies have realised the importance of good service in competitive markets although that varies between industries.

Added to that is the stripping out of costs in areas like customer service has largely run its course over the past few decades and in most organisations there is little fat left to cut from client facing functions.

Falling prices for technology, if not labour, does offer scope for smaller businesses to engage call centre providers that were once only available to larger corporates.

Like most industries, the relationship between workers and automation in call centres is playing out in complex ways as staff get to use more advanced skills and low value tasks are given to machines.

The evolution of the call centre may well be a pointer for other industries as we all grapple with the effects of automation.

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Confessions of a corporate axe man

Corporate axe man Rob Gaunt has some bad about the future of work in his book Eliminate, Automate, Offshore.

What does the future of work really look like? Management consultant Rob Gaunt has some bad new for those looking forward to a future of leisure.

In his book Eliminate, Automate, Offshore; Gaunt looks at how the modern workplace is changing and the priorities of managements and boards in a competitive, globalised world.

Gaunt, who describes himself as a ‘corporate axe man’ warns the reader “you may not approve or like what I do, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen.”

To start the book, Gaunt gives a potted history of automation in the workforce and how processes can be improved by better management and new technology. He cites his local council garbage collection service which not so long ago would have required eight or nine workers per truck now only needing two.

This trend is coming to the rest of the workforce, Gaunt warns, adding that many of those jobs that can’t be automated can be outsourced.

“When I walk into an open plan office, I look and listen to the activity; if the overwhelming noise is of keyboard strokes rather than human voices, it’s a good clue that much of the functions being performed aren’t location dependent.”

Gaunt goes on to describe how effective outsourcing works with an emphasis on the client having to document their processes before shifting functions or departments to outside contractors as well as the importance of properly scoping and understanding an agreement.

Towards the end of the book, Gaunt examines what roles are likely to survive in higher cost economies along with the skills today’s children are going to need if they are going to avoid being ‘digital roadkill’ in an automated society.

Overall the book is a good read to understand the direction of today’s workforce and the factors driving it. It isn’t a pretty tale.

If anything; Eliminate, Automate, Offshore may be somewhat optimistic about the effects on the skilled trades, professional and managerial sectors as Gaunt probably underestimates how robotics and artificial intelligence are advancing.

Should you read the book, you may want to give your kids – and their teachers – a good talking too. The axe man is ruthless and he’s coming for many of our jobs.

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Meeting the future head on

What lies ahead for business is the topic we’ll be looking at the Meeting the Future Head-On panel

What can businesses do to prepare for an exciting but challenging future?

As part of the New South Wales Government’s Back to Business Week, I’ll be on the Meet the Future Head-On panel looking at the future of business and work.

Facilitated by Jo Kelly, Director of People, Place and Partnership, the seminar will look at local and global business changes and what they mean for small to medium companies.

The keynote speakers are Terry Rawnsley – Principal & Partner of SGS Economics and Planning – who’ll discuss his company’s analysis of the economy in the year 2026, and Karen Borg – the Chief Executive Officer of Jobs for NSW – with an overview of the state’s Jobs for the Future report.

Joining me on the panel will be Paul Fairhead, the Managing Director of Huddle; Jost Stollmann, the Executive Director of Tyro Payments and Marianne McGee, the owner of Allis Technology.

Tickets for the 6pm event on March 1 at the Sydney International Convention Centre are free and can be booked through Eventbrite.

Come along and have your say. Look forward to seeing you there.

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Automating out white collar jobs

The effects of automation are difficult to predict but the machines are coming for management and white collar roles.

 

The statistics continue to come about the challenging future of work with the Harvard Business Review looking at how artificial intelligence is changing the role of knowledge workers and the World Economic Forum reports how Japan is already well down the track of automating many ‘white collar’ roles.

A couple of decades or so back, the assumption was ‘knowledge work’ represented the future of employment and the thought of management being replaced by computers or robots was unthinkable.

That hasn’t proved to be so as the low end jobs, which we thought would be taken up by displaced industrial workers were offshored, subject to a ‘race to the bottom’ in pay rates and, now, are increasingly becoming automated.

While the robots first came for call centre workers, it’s quite likely the next wave of will affect white colour workers reports Dan Tynan in The Guardian who has an overview of some of the likely fates of various occupations.

A good example of the shift, are lawyers with Tynan citing the company DoNotPay which uses AI to help customers fight traffic infringements as an example of the legal profession being automated out.

Bad for young lawyers

This though isn’t new in the legal profession. Over the past twenty years many roles in fields such as property conveyancing and contract drafting have been offshored, so much so that junior lawyer’s payrates and job prospects have collapsed as entry level jobs have dried up.

How the legal profession has used automation and offshoring is a good indicator of how these tradition industries are evolving, now a senior lawyer can handle more work and the need for juniors and paralegals is reduced. The work stays with the older worker while younger workers need to look elsewhere.

While Tynan discounts the effects of automation on the construction and health industries, those sectors are similarly being changed. Robot bricklayers, for example, allow older workers to stay in the industry longer and increase productivity.

The internet of things and artificial intelligence are similarly taking the load of nurses and doctors while making diagnostics faster and easier with major ramifications of these industries.

Dirty data

There are weaknesses in a data driven world and this gives us clues to where the future jobs may lie, the Harvard Business Review optimistically notes many roles can “composed of work that can be codified into standard steps and of decisions based on cleanly formatted data,” however obtaining ‘cleanly formatted data’ is a challenge for many organisations and managing exceptions, or ‘dirty data’ feeds, shouldn’t be underestimated.

Unexpected consequences exist as well, the media industry being a good example. While the demand for content has exploded, the rise of user generated content on social media and the collapse of advertising models has upended publishing, writing and journalism. While artificial intelligence and animation can replace actors and reporters, it hasn’t done so in a major way yet.

How industry sectors will be affected by automation is something the US Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at in 2010.

The roles which the US BLS estimates may be less affected by automation may be more affected than we think – how the retail and media industries changed in the twentieth century is instructive where the models at the beginning of the century were upended but by the end of the millennium employment in those sectors was higher than ever.

The future of work isn’t obvious and the effects of automation bring a range of unforeseen consequence and opportunities – this is why we can’t rest on our laurels and assume our jobs, trades and professions will be untouched by change.

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