Can your job be replaced by automation today?
Imagine it’s just another weekday.
Monday, 8 am. You come to work, sit at your desk and sip freshly brewed coffee while turning on your PC. A few minutes later, after opening a spreadsheet to work on an unfinished report for your boss, you check for new messages on a mail app and open Slack to ask your colleagues what they’re doing for lunch.
Then you pick up a phone and talk to a few business partners and customers. As emails keep pouring in, your respond to a few. A colleague from Finance stops by to discuss the monthly report that’s due this Friday. At 11 am, Martha, your new intern from Bilbao, Spain, comes to ask for more work because she’s already prepared a presentation for your boss, God bless her! When you finally have a spare minute while you sip your second morning coffee, you open up this book, look at this page and feel indignant when the author has the gall to say: Everything you have done so far this morning could be done by a computer. Your apparently important job can be replaced by that piece of plastic and metal sitting at your desk. Sorry!
This is an excerpt from a newly published book “Customer Service in the Transhuman Age” that you can order in paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon Books now.
How dare he, or, er, how dare I? But what have you done today that’s so unique or complex that artificial intelligence, a robot or the newest computer couldn’t do without you? Sending emails? That’s so ‘90s. Gmail is now capable of drafting surprisingly accurate responses by automatically analyzing the content of incoming messages. Ok, what about talking on the phone? Interactive Voice Responders that are capable of guiding callers to an appropriate action have been used by practically every large company for over two decades. Their capabilities have recently been enriched by voice recognition systems, and AI-powered intelligent responders. Besides, your computer doesn’t need two coffees every morning, doesn’t require lunch breaks, and will never ask your boss for a sick day.
Just another weekday.
Except it’s your last day at work.
Get your job under control
How can you stop this process and get your job back under control? Your best chance to keep doing the work you like is to keep coaching and managing your interns, keep building relationships with your customers and keep seeking new challenges that stretch your creative and cognitive skills. I invent and improvise, therefore I am.
Still, your job might be even more secure than many of your colleagues and peers. There are over 14 million contact center agents picking up phones and responding to incoming customer chats from Buenos Aires to Dallas, Madrid, Belgrade, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi and the city where you are right now. In the United States alone, there are over 2.5 million agents making about $17 (€14.70) an hour. American contact centers have hired over 800,000 workers over the past five years, and more jobs are expected to be created because the Trump administration is pushing American companies to bring jobs back to the home market. Offshoring and outsourcing companies had billed close to $80 billion (€69 billion) by 2016, roughly 12% of what was generated in the United States.
Can the entire $80 billion (€69 billion) customer service industry, which employs over 15 million people, just disappear due to automation and computerization?
The simple answer is no. The entire customer service industry will not disappear. However, it is more than likely that the industry will be fundamentally changed due to automation, artificial intelligence and overall technological advancement in the upcoming decades.
This was an excerpt from a newly published book “Customer Service in the Transhuman Age” that you can order in paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon Books now.
A guide for making your job irreplaceable
By analyzing research on the future of work, computer automation and human labor, I’ve created a list of 10 key personal work attributes to help make your job irreplaceable. If you apply at least seven of the following 10 attributes in your day-to-day work, the probability of your job being replaced by a computer is significantly reduced, if not eliminated entirely. However, it’s important to note that this research is based on currently available technological capabilities, and due to the anticipated rapid improvement of computational technology in the near future, the situation is very likely to change
Download the Guide for Irreplaceable Worker in PDF now.
(It’s going to look great in your office too.)