The future of businesses and jobs

The anticipated automation of business operations is a challenge both for the country’s industry sector and current labor force.

The application of computer systems enabled by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) will require businesses to go fully digital and will prompt the current Filipino workers to up‑skill in order to adapt and remain in the game.

According to Richard Jones, vice president of Automation Anywhere in Asia Pacific, enterprises in the whole world will, sooner or later, be data‑driven.

“The business environment is changing dramatically. The technology shift is moving even faster than we can fathom,” he said during the 9th International IT‑BPM Summit last Nov. 7 at Makati Shangri‑La, Makati City.

The data‑driven transition can be seen today as some of the world’s largest companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are all utilizing their usersí data in growing their businesses.

Allowing data to be at the forefront of a business operation could only be possible with the application of automation systems or AI, Jones said.

He added that integrating such technologies could guarantee cost reduction, and assure productivity, accuracy and compliance for businesses. Automation, he added, would also help companies to achieve scalability and flexibility and will enable them to identify and remove non‑valuable processes for a faster operation.

“For far too long we forced ourselves to try and do robotic‑like functions and today we live in a world where that can change,” he said.

A report by Accenture presented during the forum supports this claim. According to the report, successful application of AI could increase a business’s profit by an average of 38% by 2035. Moreover, the report said AI could boost the economy by $14 trillion in additional gross value added across 16 industries in 12 economies.

However, Mr. Jones said that large enterprises, despite having all resources to adapt to new technologies, will face the biggest challenge in the future.

“The problem is the phase of change and the speed of which we change creates a tectonic gap, a huge seismic gap between the future and the reality,” he said. “Large enterprises have the biggest challenge of all—to be modernized and digital, yet [retain] their legacy.”

He further said: “We as industry have done a fantastic job of creating change constantly. We have to keep our legacy, embrace the new, and try and beat the digital natives.”

In doing so, large enterprises should be careful in identifying proper critical functions, capabilities, operations, systems, and processes that can modernized through robotics, through integrations, and through people.

Creating a digital workforce

While some fear that the cost of these technologies will be employment, AI and automation will pave the way for new and advanced jobs.

The use of AI‑enabled computer systems and the so‑called “bots” will surely replace a few positions, but it will also allow people to up‑skill and learn “more complicated” jobs.

“The next arbitrage movement is the arbitrage of automation. The arbitrage of automation is bringing together the labor arbitrage, process arbitrage, and the automation flow to create a unified arbitrage, robotic‑ or AI‑driven enterprise,” Jones said.

In fact, Automation Anywhere, according to Jones, plans to employ three million digital workers by 2020, thereby becoming the “largest employer without employees.”

Jones added that current jobs that can’t be easily disrupted by AI have the biggest chance to remain in‑demand in the future. For example, he said, recreational therapists will still have huge opportunities in the future while those in the telemarketing have the highest possibility to be dissolved.

He said, “[t]he imperative of a digital workforce is to enable human intellect to achieve greater things by taking robots out of humans and putting human‑like intelligence [into] the bots.”