> but the person that did that one task had 20 other tasks beyond that single one that were not yet automated, so the job remained.
I used to be an innovation analyst at a bank and we looked at automating tasks quite frequently and found that many could be automated. But you are right on the money for why it did not happen.
Tasks are straightforward to automate. Entire job roles are not. If you want to save headcount, you need to automate some tasks and then rethink one, if not several, job roles. That is a lot messier to do.
In most cases, we decided not to bother as we didn't think there would be a net savings.
There's also value in having a worker with slack in their day, who can pick up a new menial task as soon as it arises, and not have to wait for us code-types to program up a solution.
I used to be an innovation analyst at a bank and we looked at automating tasks quite frequently and found that many could be automated. But you are right on the money for why it did not happen.
Tasks are straightforward to automate. Entire job roles are not. If you want to save headcount, you need to automate some tasks and then rethink one, if not several, job roles. That is a lot messier to do.
In most cases, we decided not to bother as we didn't think there would be a net savings.