Will Cognitive Procurement Create or Kill Jobs?
Earlier this week the British newspaper website ‘The Guardian’ ran the highly clickable headline, Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021.
This type of alarmist narrative is not new to cognitive computing and AI space. Last year, the BBC ran an article backed by figures from Oxford University and Deloitte suggesting that 35% of jobs were “at risk of computerisation”. The Boston Globe recently ran with the title Robots will take your job and NPR, usually a bastion of logic and reason, have created a calculator that provides what they call a “definitive guide” as to whether or not your job will be taken by robot. It’s all a bit concerning isn’t it?
Today, however I want to present the other side of this equation. While its true that some jobs will become less relevant as computing power increases, this new landscape will also create jobs.
None of this is new either. How many web developers did you know 25 years ago? How about social media managers? For every closed BlockBuster Video store, 50 network administrators have been hired.
If we want to look at the jobs that increased processing power might create, it pays to focus on two things, what humans are good at and what computers suck at.
Robots, In there current iteration (and for the foreseeable future), are not able to negotiate with or persuade people. They cannot generate new ideas. Sure they can help us solve problems, but they are not capable of carrying this out on their own. For most of us, computers or robots will not replace our jobs, they’ll supplement them. Procurement executives will enter meetings with better information, they’ll use this information to make smarter decisions, but any negotiation or deal making will still remain firmly in the human realm.
It’s true that too that roles will change with this increase of knowledge. A doctor might spend more time on his bedside manner and interacting with his patients as the burden of reading and processing the vast amounts of evidence required to be a ‘good doctor’ is more tightly reinforced by technology.
Of course, some roles will go. Before the age of the industrial revolution you could have a long career in shifting boxes from one side of a plant to another. These sort of single track roles were easily replaced by machinery. However in today’s knowledge economy, very few of us have such one tracked roles. Removing one transactional or menial part of our job, does not leave us jobless, it leaves us with more time to focus on the value generating activities we undertake in our jobs. AI and cognitive computing focusses on the automation of tasks, not the automation of jobs and I for one see this trend continuing.
Many of the jobs cognitive computing will create haven’t even been dreamt up yet. But if you need an insight into to some of the roles coming down the pipeline, check out this glassdoor.com page. It shows the 972 roles currently advertised under cognitive computing at IBM today.
I know it can be hard to do in today’s headline and hype driven media environment, but in the procurement sphere at least, I think we can all relax a little on the ‘robots are coming for our jobs’ narrative.
