The promise of technology has always been about freeing up human capital, so that it becomes available to value-adding activities inside the enterprise. The advent of new technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) marks a paradigm shift in the utilization of the workforce. RPA makes use of new technology and bots to automate workflows traditionally done by technology and human intervention, which previously required some level of structured decision making. With the digital workers (bots), the adoption of such automated workflows is becoming common, and it replaces the human elements. But now, the age-old controversy has come back to the limelight — will digital workers replace humans?

Bots are changing the way we work

Bots are beginning to have a huge impact on the way B2B and B2C businesses operate.

With more and more organizations adopting new technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to improve process efficiencies in legacy applications, bot-led automation has the potential to revolutionize the way business is done. Skill sets that were considered as valuable are becoming obsolete with the onset of bot aided automation. Summarizing the benefits described in the Introduction to RPA, let us see how bots impact today’s work scenario:

Man-machine coordination

Organizations make use of bots in various business verticals ranging from customer service to resolving critical IT issues. Instead of learning how to access complex menus and remembering complicated commands to do a task, bots can be made to do it with simple voice requests or text messages. It is like having a personal assistant, they can assist in admin and secretarial tasks like managing calendars to automating critical workflows.

Improved data analytics

Business goals driven by data require sifting through large amounts of data for analytical purposes, bots come in handy. They help identify the right data sets and even combine, compare, and contrast collected data, and identify patterns to make meaningful analysis. Insights-driven advanced analytics help businesses to increase revenue, reduce costs and understand customer behavior. These factors are crucial for businesses to act in real-time.

Enhanced customer experience

Your call is waiting, and you will be answered in 8 minutes — voice message from customer service calls irritate already frustrated customers. In banking, insurance, food, retail, and other consumer-driven businesses, chabots are changing the customer experience by boosting instant engagement with customers. They also act as the first line of communication and gather information, which is sent upstream for further processing that leads to quick turnaround times for resolving issues and servicing requests. 24/7 availability is the new norm in the customer service industry, and using bots to facilitate this expectation becomes a viable option even for small players.

Increased efficiency

Bots can be used to communicate with the right resources to take timely action. For example, when a critical bug is reported in Jira, it can generate a ticket and send an alert message to official emails. But, by enabling bots, an automated workflow can be triggered. For example, it can send an alert on communication platform like Slack, where the users are often engaged, and enable them to access the case details without having to log into Jira.

With bots practically replacing humans in some of these areas, there is quite understandably, a lot of misunderstanding and fear of job loss. But bots are moving beyond the enterprise and beginning to impact our personal lives as well.

How bots are changing the way we live

At home

Today, we converse with Alexa, Siri and Cortona — our bot enabled digital assistants and integrated them into our lives. In fact, it has become common to display the capabilities of our bot-enabled gadgets to friends and family, quite like the way a previous generation showcased their children’s singing and dancing skills to guests. By sending simple voice commands or short texts, bots are capable of fetching the latest news in areas of interest to us, to delivering a list of nearby events and other contextual suggestions. Bots can even book us a table at the restaurant and find the shortest route to reach the desired destination. We have started living with the bots.

Bots in popular culture

Popular personalities like singers, sportsmen and politicians have started using bots to handle their large volume of social media messages and conversations. These bots can be used as good or bad actors to shape social behavior or influence decision making. Bots that are used for promotional activities, like increasing fan engagement during football season or promptly reminding the health conscious users to take food on time, fall on the good side. BBC, in their Tech section, reported on net neutrality debate ‘controlled by bots’. In this incident, bots were bad actors, as they were used in posting tonnes of biased messages to manipulate decision making that could have had a negative impact on data consumers.

Will bots replace humans?

Machines replacing human labor has been the subject of science fiction over a hundred years now and had a big role in fuelling the industrial revolution itself. Therefore, this widespread paranoia is not entirely unique to the emerging 4th industrial revolution. Now that we have started living with the bots in our personal lives, surely we can learn to co-exist with the bots in our professional lives as well.

In a recent McKinsey report, the researchers have quoted a conclusion from a 1960’s commission, “the basic fact that technology destroys jobs, but not work.” This holds true even now. On similar grounds, the report suggests that advancements in today’s automation may not necessarily destroy jobs, it could potentially change the nature of existing jobs or create new jobs arising from new occupations. Here is a snapshot from the report that predicts the job market:

Even this report only answers a lot of ‘it depends’ type of predictions. The main factors for these predictions are based on current technologies and outcomes may differ, depending on the pace at which technology develops and the speed at which it is adopted. Presently, bots are complementing the human workforce. There is still time before we have a bot on the lines of Winston in Dan Brown’s Origin. So for the foreseeable future, it is safe to conclude that bots will empower, not overpower us.

Working in tandem with the bots

“As human beings live longer and retire later, it makes sense to work with RPA not necessarily to put workers on the unemployment line, but to retrain them in ways that make sense for what we are capable of creating and producing in the 21st century.” — Frank Casale

Several predictions have been made by looking to the future of work through the RPA lens. It shows that some jobs may cease to exist, but there are new jobs getting created as well. These predictions, though speculative, suggest a promising future for a human-digital hybrid workforce. Even businesses have started to encourage upskilling of the human workers for the RPA-driven future job market. So will bots take our jobs? The answer is — only if it’s repetitive, rule-driven and does not create any fresh value for the enterprise.