Enterprise Bots And Automation Frees Up Employees - Now What?

The rise of enterprise bots -- "digital workers" that can take on employees' repetitive and routine tasks -- promise to help elevate affected employees to higher-level, more creative tasks.  All good stuff, but as the bots save an hour here and an hour there, is it possible to track the value of these new hours? How will employees know what direction to take things as they are liberated from low-value tasks?

These were among the questions explored in an executive roundtable hosted by Automation Anywhere at its recent New York conference. Enterprise bots are taking on a range of tasks, from organizing workflows to collecting data. However, "automating a task through robotics is not someone's whole job," says Cay Gliebe, SVP of marketing and product management for OneSource Virtual. "This is a fraction of what they do. It’s a task, not a digital worker. It's not this series of tasks that can take out definite blocks of hours."

The move to higher-level activities as a result of automation "doesn't happen by itself," agrees Douglas Williams, managing partner with Deloitte Robotics & Intelligent Automation. "It's very easy to say we created a bunch of hours that were repurposed for a higher-value task," he says. "Well, show me how you actually did that. What did you actually have to do to do that? You have to look at the fractional nature many of the tasks which you're automating. You have to couple it with not just value tracking, you have to couple it with core operational organizational task redesign."

Gliebe recalls how at at her company, "we had 80 ideas that floated up. They would save us an hour a month. It would save us an hour every couple of weeks. Another group would have an hour, and then another group would have an hour. The problem is, you can't aggregate that into a business case. It's about whittling away at these fractional things that starts to free the person up to do something else. But the question is, what is this something else that you even want them to do? And did they do that thing? Is this new thing that all of a sudden they are doing that brings a return to the business? You have to get at that to really be doing this the right way."

The need to rearrange the roles of human versus digital workers points to the importance of human factors in automation decisions. The growth of jobs in automated settings is on an uncertain path, according to Neeti Mehta, SVP of brand strategy and culture for Automation Anywhere.  "We don't even know what jobs are going to exist in the next five, 10, 15 years.  We don’t even know the service industries are going to exist. All are going to change so much. We're going to innovate so much into it. How can you ready yourself for a career when you don’t know what the end is going to be?"

Preparing for a automation-rich career involves "embracing the tools that are going to help you adjust, get there faster, be going to be ready for it," Mehta says. "And the digital workforce, in my opinion, is one of those things that is an absolute must -- because it's going to get you there faster. It will get you there, no matter direction you go, you will use it. Whether it's in one industry or the other, whether it's in one job profile or the other, it’s a must have for the next wave of career development."

There is also concern about over-inflated expectations that come with new technology approaches such as digital workers and robotic process automation. "We find people tend to think it's easier than it is," says David Neely, managing director with KPMG. "Many clients are surprised when they are first started down the journey. 'Hey, I was led to believe that I could build a bot in a day, and I'm just going to throw this switch and I can walk away from it.' There's a big risk of having missed expectations."

Ultimately, the organizations that will succeed in tomorrow's economy are those that learn to leverage the power of automation in combination with human imagination for one purpose -- serving the customer. "Can you imagine an organization not using computers today? It's as simple as that," Mehta says. "As an entrepreneur and a businesswomen, what are you bringing to market? What are you bringing to it that your customers love and want? And how can you bring it to them better faster easier, or more cost-effectively? That allows you to innovate, it allows your customers to thrive. As a leader, you have to bring your organization with you to embrace these new technologies, or you will be left behind. It’s as simple as that."
