As many enjoy their summer getaway, a Canadian robot has just hitched (no hiking) from Nova Scotia to Victoria BC, a journey of some 6,000 kilometers.
HitchBOT, the brainchild of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), is a friendly kind of helpless looking robot that appears to have a washing-up glove as a hand, which it uses in order to carryout the crucial hitching.
The robot has crossed the whole country, one ride to the next. The machine has a face, can tweet and can carry on some rudimentary conversation too — enough to talk someone into giving it a lift, apparently.
The idea is to test whether humans can be trusted by robots. Naturally, this is an issue that is normally viewed the other way round. During the journey, the robot fished, camped and attended a wedding. All in all it seems to have had a good time on the way — judging by the smiling selfies with the good people who have been kind enough to give it lifts. So far so good.
In our theme of software robots — clerical robots that mimic admin staff, is there an analogy to hitchBOT and some kind of upside in the collaboration with humans, or is it simply cold commercial advantage delivered though a low-cost workforce?
Well, firstly we should state some basics: they do take jobs. As the momentum in the field grows most will see this firsthand.
They replace humans doing rules-based routine work because it is vastly economic to do so. The actual cost of the robot may be more or less than that of a person, the real gains, however, are all the upside benefits of flexible automation. If humans are going to compete with this then it is vital to understand what this robotic competition offers.
The challenge ultimately is that robots present relentless advantage. To see what I mean it should be understood they do at least four jobs — and only one of which is the automation of the core task where a human is directly replaced! To see this more clearly lets go through them.
The robot can work 24 hours a day — which is at least three times a human shift. This actually implies they could be doing seven or eight jobs. Recall that even hitchBOT was “working” (i.e., achieving a task) as it carries out its experiment. However, forgetting for the moment the actual automation what else are these things up to?
I should build this up, but let’s just list them: Job 1 — the automation (we know!); Job 2: capacity planning; Job 3: documentation; Job 4: analytics modeling.
Capacity management is a massive job. Any clerical service organization that is not struggling with capacity management is probably not trying hard enough. Robots give scale — up and down. Based in the cloud with dial-up processing, it offers almost infinite acceleration.
No more stuffing the staffing numbers to sandbag capacity. The robots are used and paid as and when they work. This is night-and-day from what exists now and is probably the real job killer.
To date, in many instances software robots are being used in routine work that is carried out by temporary staff, or staff that is hired to fulfill seasonal peaks, or for staff bursts that are required by regulatory spikes, new product launches or some new operation being introduced.
These types of planning challenges are the daily burden of the operations teams. Operations heads have been trying to predict what staffing levels are needed and how to keep pace with the rigors of changing market demands since administrative services began. Let alone overlaying the complexity of staff turnover and wage demands which is a tough, expensive job. For these operations heads, software robots are almost the first time they have had a genuine productivity tool.
Think of the issues with the mass hiring in the departments we are talking about. The business is growing — your colleagues are demanding more capacity so they can grow revenue. Business is faltering — your colleagues (not necessarily the same ones) are now demanding immediate reductions so that margins can be maintained.
Market analysts hear this all the time — especially from the BPOs who specialize in this kind of work. Woe be the operations head: “Margins are down because investment is required to match growth — confirmed CEO X.” “Margins are down because there has been a slow down in demand — confessed CFO Y.” Up or down the market loses. Robots change this.
It is also the reason why shareholders will eventually demand businesses bring in senior management that get this and gets on with it. It is of course conceivable that programmatic trading will end up punishing companies for not using robots — so robots could end up demanding more robots!
The upside is clearly commercial for admin robots — but is there a sweeter side? The one area that gets overlooked is the job satisfaction of the robot leaders. Organizations that have committed millions of dollars to software robots, and that have made the cultural change to use them, have staff (and end customers) that are delighted. They come to work as operations designers who want to make things run faster, cheaper, more accurately and with greater flexibility and scale.
Rather than run when their colleagues ask about launching new products, or taking on new customers, they actually turn toward the gunfire. So perhaps as with hitchBOT some humans have decided trust works. We’ll look at the other robot jobs next time.
Jason Kingdon is chairman of the robotic automation company Blue Prism.
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