Don't call me Bot - I have a name
In January while visiting hi-tech companies in Mumbai, India I was exposed to the IT flavor of the month – BOTS. Coming from a hard core development background I was obviously skeptical about this new fad-term that is getting COOs around the globe all excited.
However, once the concept sunk in I did not only realize this is no fad but also kicked myself that I didn’t think of it first. BOTS, or robots, are anonymous automated software applications that interact with one or various other applications in the same way a human would.
Read your email today? Sure you did! Responded to any, “Thanks”, “Looks Good”, “Well done!”, “Let’s catch up”? An email Bot or ChatBot could do all this for you.
Take a more complicated task…you receive (via email) an Excel file every day containing new customers. IT cannot currently integrate the Transactional system with the New Customer System so you end up manually entering the ten or so new customer on the Transactional system.
Typically we would start a project to integrate the systems, automatically pushing data from one system to the other. However, due to resource constraints this project would take years…in the meantime poor Winston Smith is manually entering customers into Watson. Due to the complexity of systems and especially considering the regulatory restrictions it has become extremely expensive to make changes to systems. Consider for instance adding a new product to a core trading system. You need to engage the vendor to make the change, risk, finance and compliance to test and sign-off and notify a host of other stakeholders about the change. This can take months if not years to achieve. For some time now it has been more efficient to change the process, add more people and solve manually where systems fail.
In steps, or rather download, the Bots!
So what can Bots do?
1. Bots can open and read the Excel file downloaded from your “new client system”
2. Bots can then log into several different systems and add these new customers to each system and at the same time update any changed data.
3. They can “do” anything we can do on a computer. They can do it faster and more accurately.
This is all very bitsy-bytesy and reasonably straight forward, we just copy-paste anonymous pieces of software to help us do mundane work.
However, this is where it gets interesting…
In order for a Bot to function on your network “it” has to be able to login as a user, in other words act like a human. “It” needs a PC (an actual PC or VM), “it” needs an Active Directory (AD) login id, “it” needs an email address and “it” must be managed (by a Manager, called a Controller in the BOT world). In order to get all these “assets and identifications” means registering the Bot on the Human Resource (HR) and Asset Register(AR) systems as the owner of the PC, login ID and email address.
And….registering a user on the HR system REQUIRES A FIRST NAME AND SURNAME (WT??). Yes, to assign a PC, get a log in ID and email address our “human” systems requires a First Name and a Surname. You may even have to enter a valid Social Security or ID number, address and cell number. Some systems may even still require weight, height, eye color and hair color.
The whole business case for ‘hiring’ Bots is based on the fact that we don’t have capacity to change our systems and I would venture we will not be changing our HR or security systems any time soon either.
And what does this all mean for us? Will Bots take our jobs? Yes they will!
“But”, you say, “this was also said about machines during the industrial revolution”. True, but even though we couldn’t work as hard or as fast we could always out-think a machine. Bots will, at an exponentially increasing speed, learn to do our jobs and eventually learn to out think us. We can just hope that new careers will be created like mentoring, counselling or teaching Bots.
So, for now we will become mentors and the Bots will be our prodigies and the prodigies will have prodigies before the mentors turn the next decade.
Better start thinking of names to give the new kids on the block.
- Agile[K]: Dealing with Homework
- Agile[K]: Teaching Kids
- Agile: Dealing with ADHD
- Agile: Dealing with PMPs
- Agile: Dealing with SMEs
- Agile: Dealing with Life
- Agile: Don't call me Bot - I have a name
- TFL1 - Royal Swazi Spa
#REW #REWROBO
Fractional CIO | Fintech | AI | Agile | Angel VC
8 年Subrato Bhattacharya, is TCS developing any such Bots for Bancs? If so, would love to get more info:)
Agile Strategy | Business Transformation | Behavioral Segmentation | Strategy | Digital Transformation | Balanced Scorecard | CX | Program Management |
8 年So it's like an old batch file ??
I am first name: R2D2 surname: CP30
The Bankers' Plumber | Digital | DLT | Payments | CBDC | Stablecoins | Liquidity | Tokenisation | CLS | Master Networker | Master Cat Herder | Trainer, Coach & Lecturer
8 年Bot as a competing option to overhauling systems and interfaces. Not an obvious use case, but once you get your head around it, a very important one.
Banking Tech Visionary | Solving Complex Problems in Core Banking and Digital Finance | Architect of Customer-Centric Innovations
8 年Hi Ruan, Nice post..Well, Chat-Bots as personal finance managers are being talked about as early stage focus areas. These AI-powered bots are going to redefine the traditional roles and demand new skill sets from us - humans. Well, there may be even a bot to start naming a new bot on the line - new kids on the block.