“Over-automation was a mistake.
To be precise, my mistake.
People are underestimated."
Ilon Mask
This article may look like bees versus honey. Indeed, it is strange: we have been automating business for 19 years and suddenly on Habré we declare in full growth that automation is dangerous. But this is at first glance. Busting is bad in everything: drugs, sports, nutrition, safety, gambling, etc. Automation is no exception. The current trend towards increasing the automation of everything that is possible can cause great damage to any business, not just large industry. Hyper-automation is a new risk for companies. Let's discuss why.
It seemed, it seemed...
Automation is great
Automation came to us in the form in which we know it, through the jungle of three scientific and technological revolutions, and became the result of the fourth. Year after year, she freed people's hands and heads, helped, changed the quality of work and the quality of life.
- The quality of developments and products is growing - automation provides an accurate, more and more refined production mechanism over and over again, the human factor is excluded where maximum accuracy is needed.
- Accurate planning - with automation, you can set production volumes in advance, set a plan and, if resources are available, complete it on time.
- The growth of productivity against the background of a decrease in labor intensity gradually leads to a decrease in the cost of production, makes quality affordable.
- Work has become much safer - in the most dangerous areas of a person, automation replaces, technologies protect health and life at work.
- In offices, automation frees managers from routine tasks, streamlines processes, and helps pay more attention to creative, cognitive work. For this, there are CRM, ERP, BPMS, PM and the rest of the zoo of business automation systems.
There was no question of any potential harm!
Tesla spoke out loud about the problem
The topic of hyper-automation has been discussed before, but it got into the active stage of discourse when Tesla suffered a financial fiasco with the launch of the Tesla Model 3 car.
The assembly of cars was fully automated and robots were expected to solve all problems. But in fact, everything came to a complication - at some point, due to dependence on robotic assemblers, the company was not able to increase production capacity. The conveyor belt system proved to be prohibitively complex, and the Fremont, Calif., plant was in dire need of streamlining production and hiring qualified personnel. “We had a crazy, complicated network of conveyor belts and it didn't work. Therefore, we decided to get rid of all this, ”Musk commented on the story. This is a landmark situation for the automotive industry and, I think, it will become a textbook.
Tesla assembly shop at the Fremont factory
And what about small and medium-sized businesses in Russia and the CIS, which are generally automated by less than 8-10% of companies? It is better to know about the problem before it affects your company, especially since some, even very small companies, manage to automate everything and put a human career, money, time and human relationships within the team on the altar of automation. In such companies, His Majesty the Algorithm begins to rule and decide.
Five lines of advertising
We are for reasonable and competent automation, so we have:
- — powerful universal CRM in 6 editions for small and medium businesses
- — simple and convenient cloud-based ticket system and mini-CRM with an instant start
- — powerful CRM for TV and radio holdings and outdoor advertising operators; a true industry solution with media planning and more.
How can this even happen?
Automation tools for any business have become technologically and financially accessible, many company owners have begun to consider them as a cargo cult: if everything is done by robots and programs, there will be no errors, everything will be cloudless and beautiful. Some managers look at technologies as if they were real people, and vendors “incite” them: CRM will sell itself, resources will be distributed with ERP, WMS will put things in order in your warehouse… Such an understanding of automation turned out to be dangerous for those who became its blind adherent. In the end, the company recklessly buys everything that can replace people and ... gets a completely paralyzed IT infrastructure.
Why is hyper-automation dangerous?
Over-automation (or hyper-automation) is the automation (of production, operations, analytics, etc.) that entails inefficiency. Most often, this situation develops if the automated process does not take into account the human factor.
Brains dry
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) have already found their application in industry, security, transport, and even in large ERP and CRM (deal scoring, customer journey prediction, lead qualification). These technologies solve not only quality control and safety issues, but also do quite human things: monitor other equipment, control mechanical machines, recognize and use images, generate content (not in the sense of an article, but in the sense of those fragments that are needed for work). - sounds, texts, etc.) Thus, if earlier the operator worked with a CNC machine and became more qualified from incident to incident, now the role of a person is declining and the qualifications of the same craftsmen in the industry are falling sharply.
Fascinated by the possibilities of ML and AI, entrepreneurs forget that this is just a code that was invented and written by people and the code will be executed with accuracy and “from now to now”, without the slightest deviation. Thus, in all areas - from medicine to your office work - the flexibility of human thinking, the value of cognitive functions and professional expertise are lost. Imagine what would happen if pilots from the "cornfield" relied solely on autopilot? So it is in business - only human thinking is able to create innovations, methods, to be cunning in a good way and work effectively in the "man-man" and "man-machine" systems. Don't blindly rely on automation.
And this, don't mess it up in the code, okay?
Somehow not human
Probably, among Internet users there are no longer those who have not encountered bots at least once: on websites, in chats, in social networks, in the media, on forums and separately (with Alice, Siri, Oleg, finally). And if this fate bypassed you, then you probably communicated with telephone robots. Indeed, the presence of such electronic operators in business helps to relieve the manager, make his work easier and faster. But the innocent technology that small businesses have plunged into turned out to be not so simple.
According to the CX Index 2018 report, 75% of respondents said they ended their relationship with a company due to a negative experience with chat. This is an alarming number! It turns out that the consumer (that is, the one who brings money to the company) does not want to communicate with robots.
And now let's think about a very commercial and even PR task. Here is your company, it has a wonderful website - there is a chat bot on the website, a chat bot in the help, a robot + IVR on the phone and it is difficult to “get” a live interlocutor. So it turns out that the face of the company becomes ... a robot? That is, it comes out faceless. And you know, there is some tendency in the IT industry to humanize this new face. Companies come up with a technological mascot, endow it with cute features and expose it as an assistant. This is a terrible trend, hopeless, behind which there is a deep psychological dilemma: how to humanize what we ourselves have deprived of humanity?
The client wants to control the process of communication with the company, he wants a living person with flexible thinking, and not this “formulate your request again”.
I will give an example from life.
Alfa-Bank has a very good online chat in the mobile app. At the dawn of its appearance, there was even a post on Habré, in which the humanity of the operators was noted - it looked impressive, it was pleasant to communicate, from acquaintances and in RuNet every now and then there was enthusiasm about this. Alas, now more and more often the chatbot answers the keyword in the question, which is why there is an unpleasant feeling of abandonment, and even extra urgent issues have begun to be resolved for a long time.
What was good about Alpha's chat? The fact that in the center is a person, not a bot. Clients are tired of robotic, mechanical communication—even introverts. Because the bot is… dumb and soulless, just an algorithm.
So hyper-automation of communication with customers leads to disappointment and loss of loyalty.
Processes for the sake of processes
Automation is tied to individual processes in the company - and the more processes are automated, the better, so the company gets rid of problems with routine tasks. But if there are no people behind the processes who understand how they work, what principles underlie them, what limitations and failures are possible in the process, the process will make the company its hostage. In many ways, this is why it is better if processes and automation are carried out not by outside consultants, but by a working group within the company in cooperation with the developer of the automation system. Yes, it is labor-intensive, but in the end it is reliable and effective.
If you have streamlined processes, but no one who understands them, at the first failure there will be a downtime, there will be unhappy customers, missed work tasks - there will be a complete mess. Therefore, be sure to form internal expertise and appoint process holders who will control them and make changes. Automation without a person, especially in the operational activities of the company, is still not very capable.
Automation for the sake of automation is a dead end with no profit or benefit. If against this background you have a desire to reduce staff, because “something will do everything by itself”, the situation will be even worse. Therefore, a balance must be sought: between the most valuable tool of the XNUMXst century, automation, and the most valuable asset of our time - people.
In general, I finished 😉
Source: habr.com