Leslie Willcocks

Professor Emeritus

London School of Economics and Political Science

Does automation change jobs and the skills required?

Well, each organisation, and indeed sector, will be different, but the basic trend over the next 10–12 years is a move away from low skills—physical, repetitive, non-technical, non-cognitive, basic human skills—towards digital, technical (STEM) cognitive, distinctively human, medium/high skills. Think in terms of human skills like empathy, teambuilding, leadership, motivation, critical thinking and imagination. We once did this exercise in a hi-tech company and we spent some 40 minutes listing out the skills which humans bring to the workplace that singly—and especially in combination—cannot be inexpensively and easily, if at all, replicated by machines.

Let’s not get this wrong. There will still be impacts on the low skills mentioned above. But the rhetoric tends to run away with itself on this. For example, look at what is predicted for remote working—will we all turn to home working as a result of the COVID-19 experience? Well in actual fact 60 percent of the US workforce cannot work from home due to the type of work they are doing. By 2023, many organisations were settling around the notion of employees being allowed a maximum of two days homeworking in a five-day week.

The truth is the real issue is not dramatic net job loss, but of massive skills shifts. The world has 95 million surplus low skilled workers, but a 90 million shortage in medium/high skills. As one example, China will probably have to reskill some 220 million workers over the next seven years. On several estimates low skilled workers will go from 44 percent to about 32 percent of the global workforce over the next 10 years. You can see that with this massive transition, large skills shortages will be experienced, which interestingly enough, may well promote further automation.

These major skills gaps will widen without government, corporate and individual interventions. It is pretty clear also that the inequality divides arising from automation/digitalisation will require labour market institutional changes, but as yet it is not clear whether the COVID-19 experience has whetted or actually inhibited the appetite of governments for further interventions into labour markets.

“What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and what is its future role?”

RPA is a fairly straightforward piece of software that replaces a human in fairly simple, repetitive, information processing tasks. In a phrase we invented in 2015, “RPA takes the robot out of the human.” Modern organisations are absolutely full of such ‘robot’ tasks, so RPA has wide application. RPA software contains pre-configured rules which process structured input data to produce correct deterministic outcomes. If it cannot produce an answer, it throws out an exception to be handled by a human. Essentially, it's an information processing execution engine. Unlike more advanced tools, it does not ‘learn’; it does not contain complex algorithms; it cannot deal with unstructured data, images, or natural language. However, it can work well in a complementary way with both advanced cognitive tools—and also humans—as part of a broader work processing system.

The RPA role historically has been to improve labour productivity by providing a quick, cheap solution that avoids the IT prioritisation queue and delays. RPA does not need specialist developers, it can be configured quickly, and business operations can run it within IT security, protocol and guidelines. Organisations have had a lot of problems moving this kind of use to the next stage, because they tend to treat RPA as a low-level tool, despite the multiple benefits we have been seeing from its application. We will address that below.

But the future that we wrote about in our book, Becoming Strategic with Robotic Process Automation, is already being progressed, by, we would say, 20 percent of organisations across sectors. And what we are seeing, firstly, is much greater scaling—trying to apply RPA across the enterprise, and also to end-to-end processes. Some RPA products lend themselves to this more than others, because they reduce the technology integration, security and protocol problems that can arise.

Secondly, there is a shift to using RPA together with cognitive automation tools—for example one cognitive tool might structure the data for use in RPA, and another might take the data from RPA and carry out predictive analytics with that data. The result is that this sort of ecosystem of automation technologies is often called ‘intelligent automation’. Some use intelligent automation to mean using RPA and cognitive automation tools in combination. This seems as good a way to go on definitions as any. We baulk at the word ‘intelligent’, but it is certainly a more intelligent use of automation! Anyway, one result is the creation of an enabling automation platform that can give management a lot more choices, opportunities and faster innovation—not just for internal operations, but also for external relationships with customers, for new services and products, and greater competitiveness. Our research shows that organisations are accelerating their moves in this direction, not least because there is a huge amount of value being left on the table—a further US$1 trillion annually in global banking alone, according to McKinsey. But too many organisations still have a tactical view of these automation technologies, while a lot still find the challenges difficult to surmount—more below on that.

Thirdly, our research throws up leader organisations that see RPA and cognitive automation as part of much larger digital transformation efforts, moving much more work to the cloud, and combining automation technologies with other advanced digital technologies—we call them ‘SMAC/BRAIDA’—so you will observe increasing links in the future with Social media; Mobile; Analytics; Cloud services; Blockchain; Robotics; Automation of knowledge work; Internet of Things, Digital fabrication; and Augmented reality technologies. Should we add ‘metaverse’ to that list? Probably not just yet!