Who's that bot sitting next to you?

Every day in your work place you come in, and greet your colleagues, perhaps asking what their day holds, or making a request of them. With some colleagues you may be constantly interacting, passing data, instructions and requests back and forth. With others, you may greet them socially, but the work they’re doing is more isolated from you – sure, it needs to be done, and you’re interested in the output, but you don’t interact with them that much.

The advent of software automation, that takes the tedious, repetitive, rules based part of your job away from the human workforce and passes it to a software robot, or ‘Digital Worker’ to do, changes this. You’ll still come into work, greet your human colleagues, ask what they’re doing that day, make some requests, give or take some instruction, but you’ll also do that with your bot colleagues.

Let’s look at the day of a leader in a shared service function. You may instruct an Accounts Payable Digital Worker – a specific type of software robot with all the skills needed in accounts payable – running payroll functions and procedures, paying vendors, paying and monitoring expenses, maintaining general ledgers, providing reports, reconciling reports to balances - to work through a list of vendors, making sure that those bills are paid. In the meantime, you might be discussing how redrafting your cash policy, or formulating plans about currency hedging, based on a wide range on inputs, including the strategic direction of the company.

Across the hallway, in HR, a human HR exec will have asked an Onboarding New Starter bot to start working its way through checkboxes of actions to onboard new starters in the business, getting them set on payroll, informing facilities and asset management, creating an Active Directory login for them, and informed all your colleagues who need to be told when they start, and what they’ll be working on. Whilst that’s happening, the HR exec can do a face to face interview for a new hire, or deal with a recently bereaved employee – exactly the sort of job you would never want to leave to a machine.

Some of those digital workers you will interact with constantly – asking them to go and do things for you and report back – also known as ‘attended automation’. Other ‘unattended’ digital workers will work tirelessly in the background, doing those thankless, repetitive jobs. But both sorts of software robot have the same thing in common – they’re doing the bits of your job that you don’t want to.

I see a future where we all work surrounded by human and digital colleagues – some we will interact with constantly throughout the day, swapping information and requests back and forth. Others will sit more in background, getting on with their own jobs. That balance, that mix of roles, is for me the future of work.