There’s a certain amount of human ingenuity that just can’t be replaced, because we’re
solving problems for other humans, and nothing will ever know humans as well as we will.
In the places we live, work, eat, sleep & travel,
Automation is influencing the way we live our lives.
Over a dozen restaurants featuring an automated kitchen or wait staff
have opened in the San-Francisco Bay Area alone.
Across Europe, fast food companies have begun replacing cashiers with touch screen menus.
And in Japan, a Buddhist robot named Pepper presides over funerals for a fraction of the
cost of a human priest.
But don’t go automating everything without a plan in place — hastily implemented automation
causes more problems than it solves.
Let’s explore a few scenarios where automation can really help -- or really hurt.”
With a high volume of requests and limited resources, customer service is an area where
companies can save meaningful time and resources with automation.
Research has even shown that customers are perfectly happy engaging through automated
channels, like Google, to obtain information.
But when we’re really stuck on a problem, there’s something frustrating about knowing
there’s not an actual human on the other end of the line, feeling our pain.
Specifically in the world of customer support, you often hear about people saying “I don’t
want to speak to a bot.”
This is a really interesting dynamic because oftentimes, as robotic as it actually sounds,
getting a bot can get you to the right answer in the fastest and most effective way.
Automation can often feel very forced, and I think where automation goes wrong is when
companies will try to convince you that you’re talking to a human,
when you’re very clearly not.
Automation thrives when you can be very straightforward about it.
For example, you reach out to support saying “Hey, where can I find the most recent features.”
We can send an automatic response saying, “Hey, I’m a robot, based on what you sent in,
I think this is what you’re looking for.
But, please wait until a colleague of mine will get back to you.
These recent innovations have started to cross into professions
once thought impossible to automate.
Automation is already being used by some teams to build websites, create ads, and automatically
generate other creative assets.
While this concept may give some creatives cause for distress, automation is actually
an opportunity for creatives—not a threat.
Some the work that automation and artificial intelligence is taking over is that routine,
low-value work that is still necessary,
but it’s not where humans can have the most impact.
I think creatives should learn to embrace it, see it as another tool at their disposal,
creatives are used to working with a variety of tools, and automation is one of those tools
that can really magnify their efforts.
It frees them up to tackle those more exciting, and ultimately more rewarding problems.
Automation isn’t a solution itself, it’s a magnifier.
And if the underlying problem hasn’t been effectively solved,
automation will only make things worse.
People trust automation up until it fails, and then their trust is betrayed, and it takes
a long time to recover from that.
We had a recent failure where millions of Americans were not able to access
their healthcare information.
The whole system broke down, and that’s when you start to build up the distrust of
these systems.
As time goes on and the technology improves and we get more consistent, i think that people
will welcome automation into more parts of their lives.
Automation has the power to help us do more than we ever thought possible.
But it’s not a cure all.
Like any other tool, companies still need to put a lot of time, effort, and thought
into how it should be used.