Are RPA bots replacing people?
The short answer is yes, but the long answer is no. Confused? Let’s try and clarify this.
Being a bit of a veteran in the automation industry, in my experience, automation, in general, is as good as the people that make use of it.
Most of the progress for humankind relies on automation being developed by smart, capable people, which in turn creates more challenging jobs overall. However, the main concern people have with RPA bots is the way they automate tasks by imitating how humans complete processes with machines. Don’t worry; you won’t suddenly see a Terminator-like robot walking around applying for jobs at the job centre! However, they are associated with reducing the need for human employees and creating job losses.
If you’re unfamiliar with how an RPA bot behaves, they don’t run in the background like an application or change any of your existing systems; they interact with your current system the same way a person would.
The main aim of a business is to make a decent profit; unfortunately, a lot are focussed on reducing costs to make this profit margin bigger, especially in recent climates where recessions have occurred. Companies that use RPA can reduce the amount spent on wages by removing whole departments. For example, an administration department could potentially become obsolete.
Please don’t despair; it’s not all doom and gloom. RPA brings plenty of benefits to companies and their staff. If you’re an employee, sorry to disappoint but you won’t be sat in the break room eating your weight in biscuits; companies that embrace RPA technology can employ their human task force for more mentally demanding job roles while an RPA bot gets on with the repetitive and mundane tasks employees used to complete. Also, I have witnessed many situations within businesses where bots and automation have been used to secure peoples jobs by increasing the productivity of the organisation and keeping it competitive in the market place.
Still worried about bots taking over the workforce? I’ve got 2 words for you; Vision and Creativity. The ability to adopt, adapt and improve to any given situation is the best human qualities that cannot be replicated and unlikely to be within the next century at least. Humans can interact with others on a personal level; they have a sense of moral duty, understand language skills and work well together even in stressful situations. Computers can’t do any of this, who’s ever seen the blue-screen-of-death before because your PC just gives up and cannot rectify a problem? It can only work within its built-in parameters.
Now you’re breathing a sigh of relief and can see a small number of benefits to using an RPA bot, what’s stopping you from using them to automate your business processes, provide a service that uses a virtual workforce or automates logging in to your online billing systems to pay your bills? Save yourself some time and effort and relax, knowing it can be performed error-free with RPA bots.