Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar retail hyper store and then coming to the checkout counter to pay. The person operating the counter scans the barcode of every item in your cart and tells you how much you need to pay.
Today, Amazon has introduced contactless stores. These stores have no employees who have to scan barcodes all day long with joyless expressions on their faces.
What would those helpful store assistants do in retail stores with no humans at all?
Think of the person who used to sit with a register outside a residential complex and note down details of all visitors on a tattered record. Today, with an app, all appointments can be taken through a smartphone. When the visitor arrives for the meeting, she can notify through the app and get called in.
What would that keeper of the register do today?
If your answer to both the above questions was “something better”, then you have already visualized the workplace of the future.
For example, the store assistant could be reassigned to the promotions or marketing teams that could better use her experienced insights of consumer behavior and buying choices. The keeper of the register could be asked to use his experience of observing visitors for years to help the building security team filter out suspicious characters or troublemakers from visitors.
You see what just happened. Their earlier jobs required neither physical dexterity nor mental agility. But now, they were given roles that made better use of their capabilities and experience.
We at Visualyze have been creating our own vision of such a workplace, and we are very close to sharing the results with the world. So do keep a watch on this page for updates. Or better still, follow our page, and the notifications will reach you.
Around the world, we are observing the great resignation wave, with thousands of people leaving jobs and beginning completely new careers[1]. One of the primary reasons people pivoted to a new career was the numbing boredom they faced with dumbed-down job roles that could not challenge them. We spoke of two examples of this in our previous post, but there are scores of other such jobs.
As employees get taken off from monotonous and repetitive jobs, they will act more like humans and less like robots. In other words, employees will love doing jobs that challenge them to think. The employer would get a set of employees with much better engagement in their job roles. An ideal win-win situation for all. But then what would employees who get taken off from repetitive jobs do next? We foresee a future where intelligent automation can do such repetitive work, freeing many employees to do better and bigger things.
For example, someone who has been spending much time on excel sheets could make a more real contribution to financial planning if the chore of creating spreadsheets were automated.
How about the hundreds of person-hours spent by recruiters to extract relevant data from resumes? RPA can be used to go through hundreds of documents quickly and extract structured data from them. In addition, this change will free up that hiring professional to spend time thinking of ways to improve employee engagement for new hires.
In an organization’s finance and accounting division, software robots can process thousands of invoices quickly, giving the employees bandwidth for other tasks that add more value to the operations.
The possibilities are endless. Does all this sound exciting to you? We at Visualyze can’t wait to get started on replacing the ‘boring’ with the ‘thinking’ in the workplace of tomorrow. So we would be keen to hear from you – how do you see the future of work?
- With the growth of the internet, newspapers will die a slow death.
- Because of e-readers like Kindle and Kobo, printed books will go out of fashion.
- With the spread of Ola and Uber, auto-rickshaws plying on short routes in many cities of India would die out.
These are just some of the doomsday predictions made by people every time there was a disruption on the horizon. When we think of robots replacing humans at the workplace, we imagine similar visions of a changing world. Of course, we are not comfortable with that vision and visualize millions of lost jobs. But the reality is slightly different, in three ways.
First, when Visualyze talks of robots replacing humans at the workplace, we are not talking of robots that walk around and do things. Instead, we refer to software programs that can replace repetitive, monotonous, and error-prone work that humans do.
Second, as we explained in our last LinkedIn post, robots doing such jobs need not result in humans losing their employment. Instead, those human employees would only be redeployed in new roles where they can add more value.
Third, ‘replaced’ is not the right future we visualyze. Instead, we foresee a workplace where humans are assisted by software robots to do their jobs more efficiently.
Oh, by the way, none of the three dark predictions mentioned initially came true. Newspapers, books, public libraries, vinyl records are all surviving and thriving. But Uber has co-opted auto-rickshaws in their bouquet of offerings, and those auto-rickshaws are finding it easier to get short rides now.
Having explained this background, we feel that robots will be able to assist humans at the workplace. In fact, it is in the interest of both employers and employees that they do. Watch this space for updates on how Visualyze plans to partner with your organization in this endeavor.
References
Two terms are often discussed in the business process automation space – Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Automation.
RPA refers to the configuration of computer software to mimic human interactions within digital systems to execute a business process. Such software robots allow humans engaged in repetitive and rule-based tasks to be assisted in their work to improve efficiencies and remove errors.
Intelligent automation is, well, more intelligent than rule-based RPA. It goes on where RPA stops. It incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve robotic automation. Some of the aspects of intelligent automation which help it to make RPA look better are:
- Machine learning
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Intelligent document processing
That is why Visualyze.ai prefers to use the term intelligent process automation instead of RPA. Let us look at two examples where intelligent automation works ‘better than RPA.’
First, RPA can automate document handling and processing. But document processing can involve both structured and unstructured data and documents in non-standard formats. Intelligent Automation can be particularly useful in receiving and classifying documents, extracting and validating valuable data from those documents, and finally, exporting the relevant data to internal and external stakeholders.
Second, RPA can help with the screening of applicant resumes. Still, only intelligent automation will notice the stuffing of keywords in a resume and can decide the profile doesn’t have the necessary skills. This way, intelligent automation enhances the speed and accuracy of RPA but helps avoid shortlisting wrong profiles.
This is just an indicative list of possible use cases of intelligent process automation, but it is by no means exhaustive. The possibilities are endless, and the future is exciting.