The Truth About Automation

Automation does nothing but help businesses, but can the same be said for the employees that work at these businesses? With more systems depending on some type of artificial intelligence, smart automation could replace up to 25% of the current workforce over the next decade. Let's take a look at the importance of profitability and how AI is likely going to lead in a new era of human existence.

Why Are More Things Being Automated?

Most of the western economy is theoretically based on the idea of competition. To succeed, businesses have to do what they do better than their competitors. Automation offers businesses the ability to streamline operations and decrease their costs, mostly by cutting payroll. They accomplish this by automating repetitive jobs and replacing the employees who are doing these jobs with machines.

The shocking part of this isn’t that companies are doing what they are doing to get ahead, it's that people don’t properly comprehend what a business is trying to do. No matter what politicians and business owners say, the motivation of any business is to turn a profit. Only by making money can the successful business consider giving back to their community. The answer to “why are more things being automated?” is simple: efficiency and cost reduction.

How Does Automation Help Business?

Automating particular parts of a business can make a lot of difference. For instance, a business needs to sell their product or service in order to take in revenue. Sales, as those who have worked in this area could tell you, is not easy. Traditionally, it takes: long hours of assembling leads, making contact with these leads repeatedly to determine if they are actually a good fit to buy your products or services, getting rejected a lot, finally selling the product/service to a client, finalizing customer expectations/demands, starting workflow by filing work orders, following up on every sale to ensure every step of the process is being handled (billing, procurement/manufacturing, delivery, etc.), following up with the customer to determine whether the product/service is working as expected and if they’d like to expand on their investment, starting the whole process over again.

There is software built to streamline a lot of these processes for the sales professional, and many organizations of all types utilize this software to do just that. Making it easier on a company’s sales team to provide good customer results only strengthens their ability to create sales. Automation makes this all possible, and it cuts out a lot of the costs. All the points of contact every sale would need without sales automation software would likely cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, not just thousands. That is cost savings and that is the primary reason businesses are looking to automation to upgrade their operations.

How Could Automation Be a Bad Thing for Workers?

The fact is that automation will create millions of new jobs. However, the problem that workers are running into is that those millions of jobs are created in completely different fields than the ones being automated. For example, take truck drivers. There is a push by many in the tech industry to build self-driving trucks that will be able to significantly cut down on shipping company’s operational budgets. Once these trucks prove that they can work for long-haul shipping, companies won’t need to hire truck drivers and the tens of thousands of dollars they cost these companies each year. The jobs created by automating these jobs are in the development of applications for powerful new software needed to run, direct, and manage these fleets of driverless trucks. Not many long-haul truck drivers are proficient in software languages, creating a significant problem for these workers.

Trucking is not the only industry dealing with this kind of problem. The more advanced automated systems become, the more human workers will be needed to develop and support these systems, leaving a surplus of unskilled workers left to compete with other unskilled workers for the entry-level jobs that remain, while simultaneously creating a deficit in the amount of coders there are. This is the significant issue with this full force jump into automation.

If automation is going to work for both people and for businesses, there is going to have to be a structured settlement where these businesses, which are more profitable to invest some of these profits into the education of unskilled workers. Since, as we mentioned earlier, the only purpose any business ultimately has is to make larger and larger profits, it’s going to be difficult for unskilled or displaced workers to find jobs.

This problem isn’t new, but it is growing quickly. The Brookings Institute estimates that around a quarter of all jobs could be automated today, especially in the food preparation, office administration, and transportation sectors of the economy. With only 40% of current jobs having a low-risk of automation, it will be interesting to see how this push to automate affects society.

The truth is that Macro Systems utilizes automation every day to benefit our clients and our technicians. If you want to know how we are automating some critical IT management tasks, reach out to us at 703-359-9211.