Automation, the Once and Future King

I once read that our society’s major accomplishments over the last 50 years were that we had harnessed lightning and used it to get sand to think. This massive leap forward was about using information and computers to automate processes, and it really took center stage in the service marketplace. But 15 years ago labor arbitrage emerged and arguably supplanted automation as the dominant source of value creation in the services field. With the maturing of the arbitrage market, we are seeing automation reemerge at the center of service offerings, and I feel we are in the early stages of a tectonic shift where automation once again dominates the landscape.

We see this disruptive shift to automation happening in many areas. For instance, what moves the market now in end-user customer service isn’t outstanding service from India or the Philippines. It’s the emergence of “service now,” an automation SaaS play, which creates increased levels of automation for customer service.

And there is the expectation of just-in-time cloud or consumption-based CRM. I blogged before about IBM reacting to this trend by selling its transactional BPO and CRM practice when the space commoditized. Dell and CSC are other market leaders reacting to the move toward automated services.

The analytics movement is part of the shift to automation. Another hot growth area is digital commerce. Both of these areas have become largely a tools play rather than a labor arbitrage play.

The as-a-service platforms are also a manifestation of the shift to automated services. Hot new offerings are coming out as BPaaS platform-based services and disrupting the BPO space. In a previous blog I mentioned how payments companies are outperforming BPO companies because of the automated platforms that allow the payments providers to be highly profitable.

These are all harbingers of things to come as automation re-disrupts the global services world.