Transition from Human resources to Robots ?

Digital and disruption are words which have been moot points in every industry. This technology era has opened up wholly new opportunities to re-strategise business models and transform customer interactions. This holds both great potential and significant risks at all levels of the business. But most organizations have yet to articulate a comprehensive, digital enterprise workplan and prepare roadmaps for the future .This isn’t necessarily a failure of oversight: setting out a digital strategy – and an approach to digital governance – is tough. As yet, there are no best business practices or a confirmed playbook, only scattered examples. And each business will need to prioritize its approach based on its unique market dynamics – and relative digital maturity.

Besides all the changes, the most ominous and the fiercely debated issue is that of the future of employment and will robots take over. More than a handful of movies have made the fast and the big buck preying on exactly that sentiment and showing us destruction at the hand of the robots in a scale and cruelty that makes us even more insecure. Before we indulge into another set of spasms of ‘anti-machine’ rhetoric, it helps to relook at the anatomy of employment in general, across sectors. We can broadly classify work into the following categories

1. Providing expertise – these cluster of jobs are for subject matter experts who have the ability to provide deep expertise in an areas and topically most  technically professional jobs are to fall in this tranche
2. Collaborative decision making – these are jobs where there is the need for constant interaction with others , understanding data , working with people
3. Pair of hands – typical blue collar and some white collar jobs which are normally a regular set of activities which are detailed and supervised by others
4. Training , coaching and counselling – these are a slight variation of the first category of expertise , but the bulk of the work content is instructive and pedagogical

Jobs are also not endemic to a particular category and have flavours from all the categories and are normally a collage of all the categories. The immediate category which will get affected is the third one – ‘pair of hands ‘. The displacement of labour by technology and globalization is hardly a new phenomenon. Technology has been reshaping work since the first Industrial Revolution, which demolished trade groups and replaced artisanal craftsmanship with assembly line production and templated manufacturing. Globalization has been changing work for decades, thanks to trade liberalization and emerging markets.

As latest technology unfolds in the form of — AI, robotics, virtual reality, IoT and sharing economy platforms — are poised to take labour shifts to a higher level. Automation has long displaced workers in blue-collar jobs, from factory labourers to supermarket cashiers. To appreciate the scale of blue-collar displacement ahead from driverless vehicles alone, consider that driving is the single largest occupation in many parts of the world.

Disruptions will also be there in the white collar domain. Algorithms have uprooted white-collar work in the financial sector (high-frequency trading) and are starting to do so in health care (mobile health apps, surgery robotics and diagnosis by algorithm). They are even expanding into spaces once considered exclusively the domain of human creativity. Already, algorithms are writing articles indistinguishable from those written by humans and have even recently composed a musical compositions. But these are early stages and there is the need of a new line of professionals who will conceptualize these technologies. 

The role of the government is paramount here. The new wave of start-ups are already challenging regulations governing the operation of hotels, restaurants, taxis and more. The trend will accelerate with higher technology innovations like  driverless cars and medical algorithms. Workplace protections could well be challenged. In the growing freelance  economy, hard won rights that have become commonplace such as collective bargaining, the five-day workweek, paid time off and insurance against workplace injuries and unemployment could all come under threat. Independent contractors in a freelance economy have none of these protections. The start-ups disrupting work argue that existing regulations were designed for another era and do not apply nor is it relevant anymore.  There’s some validity in that, but regulation also protects consumers and workers in important ways. Governments will need to find the right balance, creating regulatory regimes designed for the future — nimble, real-time and powered by big data and smart technologies.

But at the end of all this, in the near future, the ultimate resource that companies will use more efficiently is the human resource. Labour-intensive firms everywhere will need to reinvent their business models, deploying smart technologies and using labour more productively. One result is that work will be unbundled. Just as the technology disruption unbundled music albums into songs, it will unbundle jobs into tasks, with each task performed in the most efficient manner – whether by a human resource of by a robot!