The 4 goals of automation in business
Just about every automation revolution has shared four simple goals:
- Speed up common tasks to lift productivity – get a lot more done with existing resources
- Reduce mistakes or errors – ideally improve quality of output too
- Improve safety for humans (including workers, customers, general public)
- Free up humans so they can focus on higher-value work – how much more creative or customer-focused can you be when you outsource record keeping, time tracking and other simple tasks?
The automation goal that could change your career path is the second – reduce mistakes or errors – because thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligences, jobs that involve complicated decision-making might soon be automated. Even CEOs could end up stepping aside for AI.
The fourth goal of automation – to free up humans so they can focus on higher-value work – is the main reason Deputy exists, though of course we also work hard to help businesses address the others.
Interestingly, the things that make a task tedious can also make it easier to automate. This is because the more repetitive, rules-based and predictable a task, the fewer variables need to be built into a machine’s movement, routine or programming so it can perform accurately and frequently.
Yet we also want to automate some tasks that are mostly routine but actually have huge numbers of variables, precisely because they’re time consuming for us
