An Alternative Perspective on Automation

Robots are here to take your jobs… or so they say.

Recent headlines around automation are dominated by the threat of rising automation on jobs and its impact on people and the economy. The fact that automation is a trend that will only continue is true. There are obvious business benefits like efficiency, cost-savings, and error reduction that will continue to drive investment in automation.

However, the overarching narrative that the benefits of automation come solely at the cost of people paints an incomplete picture.

While there are challenges to tackle, such as job creation, retraining, and income inequality, there is also incredible potential for automation to augment people and bring more meaning to work.

No matter what type of work people do today everyone faces a certain amount of friction in their jobs. To coordinate between teams and keep businesses running, people are required to perform administrative tasks that they were never hired to do. Hourly workers must fill out timesheets in order to get credit for the work they’ve done. Customer support agents must document all conversations and customer interactions to provide context to the rest of the business. Even highly paid corporate attorneys must manually monitor a shared email inbox for incoming legal requests. These non-core duties can take up to 60% of a person’s time.

The constant friction of work takes away from people realizing their true potential. Herein lies the true opportunity for automation.

People find meaning in work when they are able to tap into uniquely human qualities like leadership, creativity, empathy, relationship-building, and critical thinking. Automating the coordination and administrative areas of everyone’s work frees people up to demonstrate those qualities. The benefits here are not just for businesses, but more importantly, for people finding more fulfillment and satisfaction at work.

What the future of automation and robotics looks like is not an inevitability. The ultimate impact of automation on the world will depend on how each company, team, and individual designs automation into their daily processes that benefit both businesses as well as people. It is our responsibility to take a proactive approach to automation.

Here at Tonkean, we believe in automation’s promise to augment people.

That’s why our platform focuses on human-in-the-loop processes with bots that intelligently work with people to give them the information and time to maximize their potential.

Let’s exchange ideas! If you’re thinking about how to take a people-centric approach to designing automation into your processes connect with us on twitter @tonkean or learn more about our platform at www.tonkean.com.

Tonkean is a robotic automation & management platform for operations teams to integrate systems, coordinate people, and automate work intelligently and without any scripting or code.