Preparing For The Future Of Work: Bruce Orcutt of ABBYY On The Top Five Trends To Watch In The Future Of Work
An Interview with Phil La Duke
Job seekers must appreciate that digital skills will be in big demand and obtain these abilities. It may mean working with employers to become equipped, as much of the training is industry driven, or with specific colleges that offer software robotics courses.
There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute that estimated automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.
To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.
As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Bruce Orcutt, Senior Vice President, Product Marketing and Management at ABBYY, a digital intelligence company.
Bruce Orcutt is Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at ABBYY and has more than 20 years’ experience in Enterprise Software. Bruce drives global product marketing strategies across ABBYY’s entire Digital Intelligence portfolio of products. He’s played a pivotal role in envisioning and launching innovative solutions that have transformed the way people work, improved customer engagement, increased revenue, and enhanced competitive advantage for ABBYY customers in Financial Services, Insurance, Transportation, Manufacturing, and Government.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers like to get an idea of who you are and where you came from. Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you come from? What are the life experiences that most shaped your current self?
I’m proud to say I’ve played a pivotal role in envisioning and launching innovative solutions that have transformed the way people work. I guess you could call me a true veteran of enterprise software as I’ve been in the industry for more than 20 years.
My expertise is on technologies involved with image capture, document imaging, mobile platforms, text analytics, and content extraction and I currently hold two patents relating to mobile image capture.
In my current role with ABBYY I am responsible for global product marketing strategies across ABBYY’s entire Digital Intelligence portfolio of products. Having successfully launched apps, tools, and solutions for the Financial Services, Insurance, Transportation, Retail, and Manufacturing markets I am focused on driving significant revenue growth and competitive differentiation for businesses. We have more than 5,000 customers including Fortune 500 across the world, and ABBYY has offices in 14 countries. I work closely with customers, partners, industry analysts, and product development.
Also, I’m a big sports fan, and with two active children I’m either cheering on my daughter’s Division One college softball team or watching my son’s high school volleyball tournaments.
What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?
Last year companies worldwide experienced one of the biggest disruptors we’ll see in a lifetime. It taught us that employers need to be able to fast-track digital transformation to enable employees to cope with new remote ways of working.
That in turn highlighted inefficiencies in technology that no matter what future disruptors occur within the next 10 years — economic, health, environmental, or human inflicted — there will be a need for broader digital skills. More organizations will be deploying robotic process automation (RPA) and the talent gap will have a large impact on operational efforts, hiring processes, and growth efforts in every industry. In addition, the brunt of a growing software developer shortage will also be felt.
Employers must figure out how to handle the developer talent challenges to ensure intelligent automation initiatives are not stalled or derailed. Low code/no code applications will play a key role. These will make it easier for business users to become citizen developers and be empowered to quickly design, train, and deploy skills to intelligent automation platforms. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2024, 75% of large enterprises will have four or more low-code development tools for IT application development and citizen development initiatives. Knowledge workers will be more hands on with low code/no code platforms that will increase productivity and improve operational efficiency.
It is up to employers to adapt to these changes by embracing new technologies that deliver results with a good ROI. Those who don’t step up and miss the gravy train will face the death knell. Indeed, as many a 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies who don’t adapt will not survive.
The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?
I have children either in college or getting ready for college, so this question is very relevant to me. There are many ways to get an education to obtain a successful career. It could be life experience, classroom experience, or a combination of both that contribute to your success. There are many people I know who earned a college degree but currently have a career that has nothing to do with what they studied. It was their life experience going through college that led them to their vocation. Getting an education is mainly about the experience for the vocation you choose.
Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?
Workers must realize that we are now in the fourth industrial revolution where humans work side-by-side with machines in the enterprise. This means employees must be comfortable and able to work with AI and need to attain new skills to effectively supervise the huge influx of “digital workers” — driven by the rise of RPA software robots.
Digital skills will help a wide variety of professionals to augment and improve their work productivity — from the legal team, HR, accounts payable, claims adjustors, and more.
But while “teaching” the new software robot no longer requires developer knowledge in AI or machine learning, it does mean they need to gain skills to be proficient in process intelligence methods, designing, training, deploying, and managing the new digital workforce.
Job seekers must appreciate that digital skills will be in big demand and obtain these abilities. It may mean working with employers to become equipped, as much of the training is industry driven, or with specific colleges that offer software robotics courses.
The statistics of artificial intelligence and automation eliminating millions of jobs, appears frightening to some. For example, Walmart aims to eliminate cashiers altogether and Dominos is instituting pizza delivery via driverless vehicles. How should people plan their careers such that they can hedge their bets against being replaced by automation or robots?
Not all automation is about reducing headcount. In fact, the greatest benefit of adopting RPA is that it allows workers to devote their skills to higher-value tasks. This removes the burden of performing manual operations that contribute little to the organization’s growth or improving the customer experience. We at ABBYY see AI as a way of augmenting the worker’s talent rather than replacing it.
For example, instead of a Walmart cashier standing at a register all day scanning goods, they may instead be tasked with helping customers find what they want, work on a click-and-collect service or assist with packing.
And let’s not forget the importance of soft skills in many roles — communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, organization, time-management and so on. These are the sort of skills that employers need in almost every position and are crucial for success.
Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?
This trend will definitely continue. The pandemic made the urgency to deploy digital solutions a necessity, rather than a luxury.
But it won’t come without challenges. According to recent statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, an incredible four million Americans quit their jobs in April — the highest number since records began more than 20 years ago.
And with the skills shortage continuing, it is now more important than ever for companies to make efforts to lower their staff turnover and create ways of ensuring employees remain engaged and happy in their work. Restricting working patterns and insisting on a rigorous in-office location would be a bad move.
If this shift has taught us anything, it’s the importance of enabling employees to manage their own environments and experiences — and to interact in a meaningful way with the workflows they manage. Making sure staff have the right tools to do the job is a major priority. A recent ABBYY survey revealed 1 in 4 WFH employees wanted to quit their job because of bad processes. In addition, as many as 75% experienced challenges with remote working — with 40% of workers attributing it to a lack of information on solutions or tasks, and 32% blaming not having the right IT tools. So, with WFH and hybrid working becoming the norm, it’s up to employers to fully understand their processes and workflows to meet employee needs.
Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?
As Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Mark Muro noted in The Economist, “automation tends to happen in bursts, concentrated especially in bad times such as in the wake of economic shocks when humans become relatively more expensive as firms’ revenues rapidly decline.”
I have a great deal of optimism for the future of work and believe changes ahead will make life easier and more fulfilling for employees, while reducing costs for employers. Most technological changes will take away what’s often referred to a boring, mundane work — freeing up staff to concentrate on more interesting and business-centric tasks.
Also, you must remember that with each industrial revolution came a fear of mass job losses and major social upheaval, but those fears became unfounded. Work tasks and labor markets changed and adapted to cope. Economists still believe there is no need to worry as any technology that replaces a job will see people find another job. The key will lie in training and education. Think of a college course in car mechanics from just 20 years ago compared to now — spanners and wrenches are replaced with learning how to undertake computer engine analysis. As mentioned previously those working in the office of the future will also need to learn and develop new ways of working, including digital skills.
Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?
I believe the answer lies in being proactive with training. As a nation we are already aware of the importance of AI and advanced technologies to stay ahead in the global market.
The government’s plan to pump billions of dollars into science is a step in the right direction and but it’s important that a chunk of these dollars goes into AI and job creation. This is particularly relevant given research from Gartner revealing that hyper-automation — when organizations turn to technology to rapidly automate as many processes as possible — will become “a condition of survival” for companies. This type of tech also covers low-code application platforms, virtual assistants, and other process-agnostic tools — applications like conversational AI for chatbots, optical character recognition, and signature verification tools.
Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
A BOOM IN LOW CODE/NO CODE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMEMTS
When the pandemic struck in 2020, companies were in a race against time to introduce new digital ways of working to cope with a WFH culture and online customer service/expectations. A huge saving grace was no-code solutions that enabled a speedy introduction to automation to meet rapid changes. Being able to use “plug-in” products — such as no-code that are easy to adopt and consume within the enterprise and support digital transformation initiatives — is now a key desirable.
As organizations seek to keep a competitive edge in an ever-growing digital world, they must embrace easier and quicker ways of achieving automation — and no-code tools are part of that solution. Instead of software developers spending days-on-end writing code, organizations have the opportunity to buy pre-built skills from a digital marketplace to support transformation.
And because there’s very minimal technical knowledge required for these platforms, staff members most knowledgeable of their business processes and requirements can develop and update applications and software; this ultimately assists enterprises in cutting unwanted costs by eliminating the need to hire specially trained programmers or developers.
For example, if a business analyst in accounting needs to automate the processing of a W2, paystub, invoice or receipt, they can download a skill from a digital marketplace and drag-and-drop it into the workflow. No coding, no training, no expertise in imaging or capture. They will be able to automate a task that would have normally been a manually tedious job.
GROWTH OF CONTENT INTELLIGENCE
While data is necessary for enterprise automation systems there’s an assumption that companies have access to all the data they need. In reality, many automation platforms, like RPA, cannot process 80% of enterprise data because it is unstructured. RPA bots are not smart enough to recognize and understand content to accurately automate them into business processes.
Many banks recognized this problem during the peak of the Small Business Administration Payment Protection Program that gave loans to qualifying small businesses. Banks’ RPA platforms could not process the content within loan applications, so they integrated content intelligence solutions made up of OCR, machine learning and naturally language processing (NLP)to transform the unstructured data into actionable information. Banks were able to process loan applications 30 times faster than before which resulted in small businesses able to keep their doors open.
Companies are turning to AI with machine learning (ML) to transform and process content, allowing humans and AI to work together as decision makers and evolve from simple data-driven task automation to AI-driven insight, decisions, and actions.
Leaders charged with digital transformation need to know how to overcome the data-only bias and leverage AI to get more out of their content in serving customers, preventing fraud, ensuring compliance, and gaining better financial outcomes.
GROWTH OF PROCESS INTELLIGENCE
When the pandemic struck, companies rushed to automate and introduce new digital tools and processes. However, most changes turned out to be inadequate. Recent ABBYY research discovered many organizations automated the wrong procedures — causing wasted time and money. In fact, the survey revealed as many as 1-in-5 abandoned their automation project completely (22%), and 1-in-3 found the technology didn’t work as intended (32%).
It is failures like this that has led to the massive growth of process mining — or process intelligence — sophisticated technology to discover exactly which processes are best suited for automation and how they can be transformed before moving forward with any upgrades.
Process mining brings together event data from across a set of distributed processes throughout a business to create a ‘digital twin’ that can be analyzed for workflow efficiency. You can benefit from extremely useful behavior and discovery, advanced analysis, monitoring, predicting, and automatically taking action when a process instance requires it. With advanced process intelligence it will provide data that is often missing in other analyses, such as manual steps or keystrokes that are not logged in any system of record. Also, it incorporates unstructured data that is often present as a part of the overall process, but not readily available to be used for context or as an analytic dimension.
OFF THE SHELF AI SKILLS AVAILABLE FROM ONLINE DIGITAL MARKEPLACES WILL BOOST AUTOMATION EFFORTS
Many companies are already using RPA to automate manually heavy repetitive work; however, they are often hitting a brick wall with how far their RPA bots can accelerate digital growth. This is because RPA bots don’t have the ‘brains’ to perform more human-like tasks such as thinking, reasoning and decision-making.
RPA customers have quickly moved up the value chain where they are looking to automate processes involving structured and unstructured content that are connected to the process activity — see above on content intelligence.
This demand, coupled with speed and ease of implementation of these advanced technologies being a priority, companies will be turning to a digital marketplace to buy ‘’off the shelf’ AI low-code/no-code skills, which are even offered on a ‘try and buy’ basis.
In a marketplace, business users can access advanced automation capabilities on demand and easily design, train, and publish the skills that are most relevant for their business functions. With these easily available solutions, business analysts can create and build skills and then make these skills discoverable by an intelligent automation platform, such as RPA, business process management (BPM), electronic content management (ECM), chatbots and other systems of engagement, and mobile applications.
HUGE DEMAND FOR DIGITAL SKILLS
As mentioned above the growth of RPA means most humans will have a digital co-worker to help them in their role. Every job from legal work to accounts payable and HR will have their own software robot to control. This means learning how to ‘teach’ and supervise your digital colleague all manner of skills so that they can become proficient in their role.
A concerning 75 percent of global enterprises in IDC’s Future of Work report said it was difficult to recruit people with new digital skills needed for transformation, and 20 percent cited inadequate worker training was a leading challenge. As we enter a new era, business analysts with these higher skills are therefore crucial more than ever to adequately supervise and train digital workers.
Employers and employees must work together to meet this skills gap.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?
There are two life lesson quotes that come to mind that my water polo and swim coach in college used to tell us during practice. Coach Ralph “Flip” Darr would say, “I can only give you the opportunity,” meaning it’s up to us to take advantage of opportunities presented to us. And “It’s not the hours you put in but what you put in the hours.” Those lessons proved to be true, not only in the pool, but in everything I do.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
The first person that comes to mind is Dr. Amy Abernathy, the Acting CIO at the U.S. FDA. She’s leading a technology vision to accelerate scientific and regulatory decisions while under immense pressure. The FDA is a prime example of an organization where data within documents is crucial to making sound decisions yet also highly process oriented. I’d love to talk with her about how she is accelerating digital transformation within an organization that is highly regulated.
Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?
I’m frequently published in top industry publications that you can find on my company’s LinkedIn account https://www.linkedin.com/company/abbyy. You can also find me on Twitter @bdorcutt.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.
About the Interviewer: Phil La Duke is a popular speaker & writer with more than 500 works in print. He has contributed to Entrepreneur, Monster, Thrive Global and is published on all inhabited continents. His first book is a visceral, no-holds-barred look at worker safety, I Know My Shoes Are Untied! Mind Your Own Business. An Iconoclast’s View of Workers’ Safety. His most recent book is Lone Gunman: Rewriting the Handbook On Workplace Violence Prevention listed as #16 on Pretty Progressive magazine’s list of 49 books that powerful women study in detail. His third book, Blood In My Pockets Is Blood On Your Hands is expected in March followed by Loving An Addict: Collateral Damage Of the Opioid Epidemic due to be released in June. Follow Phil on Twitter @philladuke or read his weekly blog www.philladuke.wordpress.com
