RPA and New Jobs

A few months ago I had written about the impact of RPA on traditional back-office and rule based activities performed by humans.

The key impacts that are evidenced in various industries and by analysts are:

•          Jobs that had been traditionally “out-sourced” or “off-shored” are brought “in-house” or “right-shored”. This is evident in many “off-shored” or “out-sourced” services being bought back “in-house” or moved back to developed countries and economies.

•          The skill-sets needed for fulfilling the replaced jobs are not same as those that are being replaced. The new jobs are more to support and maintain the RPA. As an example if the “bot” hits an error in the process, it alerts for human intervention. This requires task to be performed by “specialized” human support, maintenance and QA – a new set of job roles.

Who benefits?

·         Employers benefit from lower costs, higher efficiency and less errors. This savings in-turn can be invested to focus on better “customer experience activities” and a more focused “customer centric” approach to business operations. In combination with Big Data, Business Analytics and Natural Language Processing, this will drive better customer services and lay the roadmap for future “cognitive” technology implementations.

·         Employees benefit from a new set of job roles that are specialized in nature and not “repetitive” in nature. There is an ample scope of people being trained on new analytics and data mining technologies that will help drive the future growth of individuals as well as organizations. More jobs will open up in area of direct customer interaction and providing better “customer experience” that machines cannot yet replicate in the near future.

The disruptions looks scary and has an impact in the short term. However, newer sectors of job roles opening up will make it more interesting for workers as well as helping organizations run better customer centric experiences.