But seriously, are robots coming for your job?
The fear is setting in. It’s ten years down the road, and finally, we have AI smart enough to think for themselves. The apocalypse is coming; they have built an army. They are here to stay, taking our jobs, and the human race is quickly dying out. All your worst nightmares are coming true, and then you wake up. Although this may be a legitimate fear for you and is in the realm of some possibility, this will likely never be the case. The likely route is that robots and AI are coming for your job, but it is in a good way. This is good because these robots are taking over the repetitive, tedious work you perform. At Bison & Bird, we call this operations automation. To an extent, we are already there. Now robots can take on many different forms in our lives today. The first that comes to mind may be self-driving cars, production lines, or robot fighting rings. What we mean by robots here is computers, software, and mechanisms that can perform repetitive jobs faster than humans.
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To you, it may seem obvious how robots can help. But let me explain a little more. According to Statistics Canada, many jobs exist today that are at risk of being taken over by automation and robots. According to this study, in 2016, 10.6% of Canadian workers were at high risk of automation-related job transformation. It is natural to fear something that may affect your livelihood. At the same time, robots are being designed and developed to help. Of course, there are exceptions where people are making robots to hurt others. Still, in this case, we are talking about the vast majority making robots, software, AI, and machine learning tools for the good of people and productivity.
I understand it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of the dark web, digital scams, or that robots are taking away jobs from real people. Technology can be scary, and change can be difficult, but that hasn’t stopped us from adopting the internet, cell phones, email, social media, and other tech items that help our everyday lives. These technical changes can even extend to the business world, where digital transformation initiatives can help your company save money and time.
In many cases, it is tough to quantify the time wasted in our day performing jobs we may not have to.
In our experience, time is the greatest commodity.
Therefore, when robots can take over more of your menial day-to-day tasks, you benefit in many different ways. Either more time with your family (instead of late-night emails), more time for sales calls (instead of spreadsheet fixing), or the opportunity to organize your desk the way you've wanted to for weeks (instead of that stack of paperwork).
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So yes, there are bad things that will come out of robots. But at the same time, they will help us move forward and make our lives easier.
Remember when you spent all day figuring out that long email chain with your team? Gone!
Or the countless time spent reading through tedious paperwork? Gone!
With our digital transformation offering, we are already helping companies relieve the burden of day-to-day tasks by looking at business processes and how we can improve your life at work. With operations automation, there is so much opportunity for robots to make your life better by creating more efficient systems and lifting the heavy repetitive workload from your shoulders. Therefore, this means that robots are taking your job, but they are taking the smaller jobs from you throughout the day, so you don’t need to do them. Someone still needs to go out and sell things. Someone still needs to deliver top-level customer service to their customers. That's the great thing; robots can never be humans.
As we embrace technology and integrate it into our everyday lives, the more we can rely on that technology to help free up our time so we can do the things that matter.
Robot apocalypse averted.
If you are looking for help with implementing robots into your business, Bison & Bird can help; we specialize in operations automation that will help streamline data and process flows across your business. Now is also a perfect time; with the Canadian Digital Adoption Program (CDAP), your business may be eligible for a $15,000 grant and access to a $100,000 interest-free loan to help you implement your robots.