5/9 Trends for the next decade. Automation: Scale-up-as-a-Service

Today we reach the fifth in this series of nine Human Experience Trends shaping the needs of the next decade: Automation. The power behind a million scale-ups.

This series considers the changes in context that technologies set running in the eco-systems of our lived experiences. The consequences are new contexts for our needs. It is in the serving of these new needs that future prosperity awaits.

The trends driving new contexts are:

1. Sustainability
2. Decentralisation
3. Personalisation
4. Low Code/No Code
5. Automation
6. Wellness
7. Small Pieces
8. Platform
9. Start-up

The most successful will be those which respond where multiple trends converge. For example a Sustainable, Decentralised, Personalised product focusing on Wellness and applying Automation to deliver an ever-improving experience.

A proxy for predicting the success of your future plans could therefore be in the number of trends ticked off.

But trends do not a value product make. Instead, trends direct you to where to look for the consequent future experiences from which need emerges.

So you will need to understand the impact of these trends on the human experience. Faster Future Consulting's #ResponsiveOrganisation framework can help here. Other frameworks are, of course, available. 

This series has already detailed 1. Sustainability 2. Decentralisation 3. Personalisation and 4, Low-Code/No-Code (links are in the list above). My intent is to put meat on the bones of each trend and explore potential consequent contexts for each. As these emerge we also explore a new narrative: We Are All Companies Now.

We continue with Automation.

5. Automation. 

Closely connected with Low Code/No Code as a trend, automation focuses on understanding processes, often very complex ones, and making them available at the touch of a button (or the trigger of a condition).

The advent of AI to add to the RPA and Machine Learning mix makes it possible for the automation to be constantly self-learning and self-improving. Intelligent Automation and Hyper-Automation have been hungrily consumed in 2020 as part of The Great Backlog Clearance. That doesn't appear to be slowing.

Just as automation now plays a large part in Cloud deployment and management of infrastructure, the convergence with trends in Start-up (of which more later in this series of posts), Low Code/No Code and Decentralisation lights the path for new roles for automation (as referenced in the notion that we are All Companies Now in Trend 2, Decentralisation.).

Imagine having first identified a new problem in an emerging future, you go ahead and create your POC (Proof of Concept) as a solution. If the full services of Cloud deployment could be delivered by a smart AI on your behalf, (because all the IT skills required have been established as learnable processes) then even this layer of the hard bits of building a business could be offered as a service. And that's not where it stops. Automation's alignment with cloud points us towards Scale-up-As-A-Service.

In this way automation becomes the founder's friend, with pay-as-you-go services in the building blocks of building the enterprise.

All those 'scale advantages' of the enterprise - centralised resources, aggregated expertise - GTM and even access to markets - are advantages for established enterprises because the cost of these central overheads reduce as a ratio to production costs as a result of centralisation as the organisation grows. But if the financial, legal, marketing, sales, corporate (etc) expertise required of a business can be automated (smart processes, built to learn) then just as cloud has given every start-up all the access to tech infrastructure it will ever need, Cloud could also deliver all the access to business infrastructure an enterprise could ever need.

Automation has a very considerable voice in the emerging new narrative that We Are All Companies Now.

Of course, automation will have increasing impact on very many more and wide areas of our lives. You need only imagine any business process to identify and discern the repeatable from the learnable from the unknowable to map where automation can be deployed. In doing so you will also have identified where the humans should focus if they are to add real value - on the less knowable.

Tomorrow: Wellness

A new narrative

The new narrative that 'We Are All Companies Now' offers a way to understand the impact of all nine trends on how we live and work. Just as the narrative 'We Are All Publishers Now' did when I coined it in relation to the impact of the web on the world of media and publishing back in 2008.

At first, even with the arrival of the web, the majority consumed what the minority produced as publishers. Today in 2020 almost everyone being entertained or informed by the web is also publishing (or at least distributing) what is consumed.

So I expect the vast majority of us will want to continue to consume what the smaller number of us create as companies (just as we did as potential publishers) for quite some time to come.

But I do expect more and more people to engage in the value creating activity we see enshrined in the formation of companies and while the first experience of this is likely to be in the context of an internal platform, it seems to me that the trends listed here (as will become clearer as the detail for each trend in the series continues), point towards a future in which how we create value and the organisations within which we do that, are reconfigured, just as the media industry has been disrupted.

As my friend Rory Yates points out, responsibility is a key part of this narrative. If capability is decentralised and empowered within the node, little will change unless the nodes (and that's you and I, folks) take responsibility for the wise and positive use of those capabilities.

In a company context, that involves a large degree of trust in employees. In the context of society, it involves a large helping of trust in each other. The very human urge to co-operate is not reduced by how much we can contribute. We return to this in trend 8 - Platform, later in this series.

• Follow Faster Future Consulting for access to the detail behind all 9 trends today.

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash