I talked to a company a few weeks ago, where they have a business process that people complete over 200 times a day.
The high level process is:
🔹 Select next record in internal CRM system
🔹 Locate matching record on an external web portal
🔹 Copy/paste data from CRM into about 10 fields
🔹 Update internal CRM that the record was updated
Each iteration takes about 3 minutes to complete; over 2,500 hours a year.
A common argument against automation is that humanity will lose control; that our analytical and cognitive skills will diminish if we hand tasks over to robots.
Maybe there is some truth in that – for complex technical professions which meet humanity head-on such as law, politics, medicine; I’ll leave commentary on that to experts in those fields.
But, where is the creativity, skill, connection, empathy, gratitude or grace in the task of copy/pasting data from a CRM to a website?
These processes are everywhere, and the focus of our work.
If humans are doing the work that a robot can do for less than $4k/year, then the humans ARE the robots.
