No, Drones Are Not Taking Our Jobs!
Work in an industry/ domain for long enough and you will soon realize that your ability to understand technical improvements & features can become so finely tuned that keeping abreast of technical advancements in the sector no longer poses a challenge and becomes second nature.
However, what continues to present a sharp learning curve even after spending years in the trenches is the ability to understand how these technical advancements and cutting edge technological breakthroughs are accepted by the market. Ironically enough, even with the most advanced technology, it’s success or failure is determined by the all important human psyche. Ask any startup junkie and he/she would be happy to explain to you why “timing” is everything in the acceptance of revolutionary ideas or technology.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle platforms (UAVs) — drones to most of us, have seen rapid technological advancements in the last few years. What was once an expensive radio controlled, remotely piloted aircraft has soon become a must have in the arsenal of every maintenance engineer, photographer and Instagram Influencer. Large scale manufacturing and improved imaging technology has reduced the public perception of drones from expensive weapons platforms used by covert government agencies to a widely available, inexpensive “toys” that can be picked up from your local electronics store.
With drone technology quickly maturing it should logically reach higher levels of acceptance and utilization with a wide variety of sectors. Right?
Well, kinda.
While the fast paced startup world was quick to adopt the technology , the corporate world found few takers. As a product manager tasked with the development of cutting edge drone software, my focus is to develop excellent software to maximize the utilization of an unmanned aerial platform. I now had an amazing product but on the other hand my business team was struggling to make any headway with large corporations despite obvious logical and financial benefits. I was aching to get in the shoes of my customers and so quickly swapped out my product hat for that of a business development manager, picked a sector of specialization and went about interviewing customers in the energy sector.
My pitch to energy firms would tell a story of using drones to decrease project finances, improve project and process efficiency during the three stages of any project — Planning, Construction, Operations & Maintenance. My last slide would almost always display a compelling side by side comparison of the obvious business advantages of investing in drones tech and the presentation would end with a triumphant grin on my face.
There was a reason I was smiling too. What would’ve taken the company a month to complete could be completed by the drone and imaging software in 3 days. A clear business case.
After a month on the road with the sales reps, I went back to the office and put down the purchasing trends I saw with my potential customers. The data showed that my valiant efforts resulted in a small, insignificant spike in sales. Every single account that had moved ahead with a purchase decision was a small to medium sized company. I had failed in the very mission that I set out to fix. However, I now had valuable data that I could use to decode my corporate customers’ decisions.
On analyzing the collected data, what stuck out like a sore thumb was that smaller companies had flat hierarchies, could make quick decisions and were operating on extremely tight budgets. Larger companies had rigidly structured hierarchies, cumbersome decision making processes but larger budgets to work with. From the outset, this doesn’t look something that I didn’t already know. However, if you feed this information into the context of corporate drone adoption, you see a pattern emerging. A pattern that satisfied me enough to go back to the head of sales with a proposal.
After promising the sales team that I wouldn’t do anything to lose the account or jeopardize the already fragile relationship, a follow up meeting was setup with a potential corporate client I had previously pitched to.
I went into the meeting armed with a deck similar to my previous meetings but with one major difference. Rather than focusing solely on the business benefits, the advantages to upskilling the department’s company personnel in order to adopt new drone technology was also highlighted. I found that my audience was different this time around. They were much more interested, curious and responsive. After the presentation, I had a chance to listen to their feedback on the last presentation and if their perception had changed this time.
Their answer was simple. The last time around, all that was presented to them was that drone technology could perform a task with near 100% accuracy, a technology that had obvious cost benefits and much higher efficiency. To me it was a simple business case — use drones to save company dollars, something that our startup customers valued deeply. To the executives at the large corporations however, my presentation was a case to make the jobs of atleast 5 loyal employees redundant. 5 loyal employees with wives, husbands and kids to feed. My presentation had triggered the primal human defensive response from my potential clients and I had committed this blunder without even knowing it.
Perspective is a crazy thing.
I took this information back to my product development process and focused on making our products more user friendly. Products that could be used without the need for any formal training. Products that are positioned as a tool to make it easier for you to perform your tasks and not perform your task for you. At the end of it, we received a contract and a signature but it really got my gears moving.
History has shown us that mainstream society cannot escape technological disruption. The industrial revolution was the first large scale event that made a large number of jobs redundant. This in turn gave rise to a new set of jobs, creative jobs that required human intelligence and higher levels of cognizance. New technology doesn’t replace jobs but rather displaces them.
Until strong thought leaders at large corporations look at technological platforms through this lens, corporations will fail to adapt in time to new technologies. Playing chicken and the egg with who adopts a technology first is not an answer either.
Placing a strong emphasis on company vision, equipping company personnel with skills for the future, reorientation of the workforce and the wide-scale adoption of the cutting edge is the way to go.
