When you think about the future of machine’s doing people’s jobs, the first thing that pops into your head are people like accountants and taxi drivers. After all, software seems to be eating up their jobs rather well at the moment. The reason those jobs have fallen, or are about to fall to the machines, is that they have a “narrow domain.” In the case of the accountant, there’s not much they do that can’t be codified into software, meaning that it won’t be long until the only thing that’s left for them to do is signing off your business return at the end. For taxi drivers (and drivers of all types), the future is looking pretty bleak as well. Robots are already driving cars around streets in places like Singapore and San Francisco, and it won’t be long until the technology is rolled out across the automotive industry.
But all these examples of machines doing the work of people involve only a relative number of tasks. Machines are replacing some human labor, but they’re not replacing the human. For instance, Quickbooks might be superb at helping startups handle payroll, but it can’t come up with a business plan, and it certainly can’t organize a team. The same goes for autonomous cars: they’re magnificent at navigating the chaotic and unpredictable environments on the road, but ask them to run a convenient store, and they wouldn’t have a clue.
These examples of the limited scope of robots mean that entrepreneurs have felt relatively safe compared to some other professions. Entrepreneurs can soothe themselves in the knowledge that machines are completely incapable of coming up with business plans and executing them in the real world. But how much longer is this happy state of affairs going to last?
Already we see enormous amounts of automation in modern tech startups. Take Jack Dorsey’s Twitter for instance. Twitter is a multi-billion dollar company, but it only employs around 50 people directly meaning that the revenue per employee is about a billion dollars. If every company were like Twitter, we’d all be billionaires. But the fact of the matter is that they are not, and neither are they likely ever to be.
Twitter is a demonstration of the power of digital systems to automate work. Rather than having thousands of employees bashing bits of metal together – which is what provided the lion’s share of employment in the twentieth century – twenty-first-century companies are replacing work with bits, bytes, and base pairs. Twitter is also an example of how the job of entrepreneurship itself is becoming more automated. It has been able to generate social, marketing and financial capital on a par with some of the biggest companies in the world, all in a fraction of the time.
The Automation Of Marketing
One of the first places where automation is likely to come for entrepreneurs is in marketing. Not only is there a significant demand for technologies that can automate this process (since it’s costly and time-consuming), there’s every possibility that it will be achieved. Marketing has become overwhelmingly digital and data-driven, both of which are required if the human is going to be taken out of the loop. Browsers collect data on individual tastes and habits and feed these into algorithms which decide which company’s advert should be shown on which banner ad and so on.
Better Error Detection Rates
The fact that machines are getting smarter might be dominating the headlines right now, with newspapers flip-flopping between saying that we’re headed for either an apocalypse or a utopia. But there’s been another, equally important revolution occurring alongside the increasing smartness of machines: the sensor revolution. The sensor revolution has primarily been driven by the growth in the smartphone market which drove their miniaturization and mass production The resulting fall in cost has meant that companies have begun using sensors to detect when materials or manufacturing processes will fail so that they can do something about it in advance.
All this complements the FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) process companies already use to make sure that errors are limited. In the future, figuring out whether a product or manufacturing process is going to fail will be real-time, thanks to embedded sensors.
Staying Active On Social Media
For businesses, the demands of social media can be unrelenting. Customers are constantly posting questions and providing feedback, but companies are limited by how much time they have to process and respond to all this user-generated content. As a result, many are looking for automated solutions that will process these issues for them. Most entrepreneurs already know that there are several automation tools out there on the market which are designed to help make the lives of entrepreneurs easier. But these tools are still rather limited.
That’s all changing though. The future of automation on social media will soon involve bots that respond to questions and post material they think is appropriate, based on target demographics. It is hoped by many entrepreneurs that these bots will be so good at what they do that they’ll be indistinguishable from people and customers will be none the wiser. It’s also hoped that they might also be able to generate content based on trending themes, though that could be more than a decade away.
Better Executive Productivity
The people at the top of companies think a lot about the things that they can do to improve the productivity of their staff. But they often neglect to think about how they can improve their own executive productivity, which is often quite low. The problem for executives is that their day is filled with dozens of small but annoying tasks which take them away from their main projects.
Emails are probably the biggest time waster, but companies like Google are looking for ways to improve this. One idea is to get bots to reply to emails that ask obvious or common questions. Another is to use digital personal assistants to help CEOs organize their own time better throughout the day and reduce administrative overhead.