Small business owners know the value of their employees. There is a lot of fear-mongering related to RPA and AI making good people obsolete.
The same concerns faced technological advances like the steam engine, electricity, cars, and the ATM.
Yes. Some jobs will cease to exist. Many dehumanizing clerical jobs will be done by RPAs in the future, but most experts agree that RPAs and other software, AI and robotics solutions will actually free those clerical workers from drudgery and allow them to do what humans do best, which is to be human, adding value to your business with their creativity and loyalty.
James Besson, in an EconTalk podcast, quoted in an American Enterprise Institute’s publication “What the story of ATMs and bank tellers reveals about the ‘rise of the robots’ and jobs,” says:
“Basically starting in the mid-1990s, ATM machines came in in big numbers. We have, now, something like 400,000-some installed in the United States. And everybody assumed –including some of the bank managers, at first — that this was going to eliminate the teller job. And it didn’t. In fact, since 2000, not only have teller jobs increased, but they’ve been growing a bit faster than the labor force as a whole. That may eventually change. But the impact of the ATM machine was not to destroy tellers, actually it was to increase it.
“What happened? Well, the average bank branch in an urban area required about 21 tellers. That was cut because of the ATM machine to about 13 tellers. But that meant it was cheaper to operate a branch. Well, banks wanted, in part because of deregulation but just for deregulation but just for basic marketing reasons, to increase the number of branch offices. And when it became cheaper to do so, demand for branch offices increased. And as a result, demand for bank tellers increased. And it increased enough to offset the labor-saving losses of jobs that would have otherwise occurred. So, again, it was one of these more dynamic things where the labor-saving technology actually created more jobs.
“We see a whole number of occupations where you might think that technology is going to destroy jobs because it’s taking over tasks; and the reverse happens. So, if you look, for instance, when they put in scanning technology into cash registers, the number of cashiers actually increased. When legal offices started using, beginning in the late 1990s, electronic discovery software for doing discovery of documents in lawsuits, the number of paralegals increased rather than decreased. …
“And so, what’s happened is that cash-handling has obviously become less important for tellers. But their ability to market and their interpersonal skills in terms of dealing with bank clients has become more important. So the transition–what the ATM machine did was effectively change the job of the bank teller into one where they are more of a marketing person. They are part of what banks call the ‘customer relationship team.’ But it’s a different sort of skill. Maybe it’s a higher skill. There is some evidence that their wages have gone up. They are hiring more college graduates as bank tellers. And in a whole variety of ways we are seeing changes of this sort where the nature of occupations is getting up-skilled in some fashion. Often very specific skills related to the particular technology, the particular job. This is happening across the board. And that’s part of the challenge that technology is posing for us: How do we develop all of these new skills?