Technological disruption: a paradox that we need to manage well

I presume that many of us have watched “Game of Thrones” and hence would be familiar with “winter is coming” statement. This dialogue has been uttered by many characters with a chilling and reverberating effect to allude towards something hugely disruptive and unprecedented.

Same analogy I would use to allude towards the disruptions caused by new age technologies specially in the organisational context.

Any technological disruption that would or has the potential to improve our quality of social , professional and individual lives should be embraced whole heartedly but we should be very conscientious while adopting technologies that has the potential to cause more upheavals than growth , disengage more than engage , create more questions than answers.

Lets see few facts and figures to understand this paradox(i would be limiting my views to organisational context only) :

In 2014 2.5 trillion $ of global economy stemmed out of technology.

Revenue enhancement through new age technologies expected to be @ 3.06 billion US dollars by 2025.

And this has largely prompted an investment of 17 billion USD dollars in last 3-4 years in new age technologies.

Companies like AirBNB in 7-8 years since its inception have reached to 60k plus cities across 200 countries and have got a market cap of 31 billion dollars. This has been possible because of new age web enabled business model.

New age technology is helping small and medium enterprises in reaching out to global markets with out much discomfort and thus improving their bottom lines and top lines significantly

New age technologies have brought the organisations and its services under a constant scanner and this is engendering an attitudinal change towards customer service. Any laxity towards customer service gets highlighted and shared through millions in flash of a second through social media and this can have colossal effect on organisations brand image conversely good customer reviews gets you more mullahs and brand strength. Just consider a case in point – according to a report 75-90% of travellers consider online reviews before booking hotels and resorts and therefore the quality of feedback plays a very important in deciding the booking for them.

Technologies like IOT and machine learning are proactively delivering solutions to business problems and improving the revenues and profitability.

All this and much more that is happening in the domain of intelligent technologies around the world is definitely enriching organisations , making systems more productive and efficient and morphing the world in to a integrated virtual market.

So where is the concern?

Lets look at the other side of the paradox-

In last 15-20 years 2.5 million jobs have been lost to automation.

By 2030 30-40% of existing roles will be usurped by machines . A research conducted by a globally renowned management institute is saying that 1 out of every 2 jobs is staring at getting automated by 2030.

By 2030 60% of existing roles would lose 25-30 % of their meat to intelligent machines.

I read in one of the article that in future backed up by 5G technology , courier companies would start using drones to deliver couriers. That would result in significant numbers of courier men and woman getting booted out. Same could be said in case of driverless cars also.

65k employees would lose their jobs this year in 6 top IT companies because of redundancy.

So on one side technological advancements are adding too much value to the organisations but on the other side if not used prudently then has the potential of causing huge employment disruptions specially for low skilled workers . This should be a cause of worry for all of us specially in a country like ours where by 2020 average age would be 29 years and 60 crores would be in the working age category.

Yes in past more jobs have been added to the repertoire on account of increased business productivity due to automation but this time experts are saying that situation is more complicated. The employment model is moving towards high end jobs and hence chances of displaced low skilled employees getting re-employed are pretty feeble.

And we all know that many of these displaced incumbents would be the sole bread earners and hence the collateral damage would be significant.

Yes i agree that the situation has been aggravated by lack of cohesion between educational system and corporate realities , lack of focus on infrastructure development, swooping agricultural incomes and so on and so forth. Lack of capability development has kept a significant chunk of human resources below optimal levels , doing low end , repetitive and menial jobs which were bound to be threatened by intelligent machines sooner or later.

But these all are structural , strategic and systemic issues and would take time to get sorted but in the interim where these unemployed employees would go , what would they do. What if they become socially disengaged and isolated , not a good sign for any society.

In the end i want to sign off with following observations:

Any technology that helps in improving the quality of human life needs to be endorsed, embraced and pushed across the globe but technology that comes and replaces cashiers , tellers in banks , packers , courier men /woman , shifters in a logistic company , waiters in restaurants , routine call handlers in call centres , drivers in transport sector etc needs to be re-looked at.

Are these changes necessary for our survival or they are just means to create markets for products like driverless car , robots etc and may be improve our margins. If they are necessary then can we delay them a bit till the time we are ready with a plan to support employees falling below skill thresholds.

But if we still feel that the benefits achieved through such changes would outweigh the social disengagement and disruptions caused , lets go full throttle and onboard robots , drones and driverless cars.