How Automation Is Shaping The Future Of IT

In recent years, we’ve become inundated with talk of automation and its implication for the future of our workforce. The idea of automation as a disrupter, displacing workers as machines learn to perform processes and tasks more efficiently, has long been debated by technologists and industry thought leaders. With Gartner predicting that 50 percent of businesses will be using artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) by 2020, one of the most important battlegrounds for transformation is the IT sector.

Information technology encompasses a broad spectrum of computer and data-related job functions, so it’s not surprising that the burgeoning wave of automation holds special significance for the future of the industry. In this post, we will outline and address expert predictions for the future of IT and, to a larger degree, work in general, as well as expel some common myths surrounding the immediate future.

It will increase productivity and economic growth

Following the economic decline in the United States in 2008, labor productivity growth sunk to a low of about .5 percent from the year 2010 to 2014. Experts from McKinsey predict that AI and automation have the potential to reverse the productivity slump, with a forecasted rise to two percent over the next ten years. This could mark an economic boom the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, over half of which will come from digital opportunities.

On a more granular level, automation has historically been regarded as a driver for baseline employee productivity. Much of this can be credited to the skill shift that occurs when employers develop and invest in automated processes and unified end-to-end software solutions. As workers begin to interact with machines on a daily basis, we will start to see greater levels of technological proficiency, emotional intelligence, and task management-centric workflow efficiencies.

It will enable higher levels of specialization

Skill shifts, as mentioned above, will become increasingly more commonplace with the emergence of AIOps. Beyond mere workplace productivity or accountability levels, experts predict a need for a dynamic leap to new job functions and role descriptions as the demand for more highly-skilled jobs increases.

Leading human resources expert Jill Lehman addressed this paradigm shift in a recent podcast: “Learning agility is what happens when you accept automation or the different technologies that help you do work, which means that once a task is automated, people have the opportunity to pivot to a new type of thinking or work that expands upon and innovates from their foundational knowledge.”

This idea is seconded by technology leaders like Mark Hurd, who said in a recent keynote that “60 percent of the jobs in IT five years from now haven’t been invented yet. All of these new technologies are going to take people from what we’re going to think of now as rudimentary paths today to new opportunities in the future. This is going to free up people to work on higher-order tasks.”

Technologists hope that automation will provide more clarity and opportunities for role specialization, as opposed to role redundancy. For many IT professionals, this speaks to the more recently argued claim that AIOps will be integrated as one specific, niche solution within a suite of related applications. Innovation will not remove the need for human expertise; it will merely free up the human workforce to focus on more forward-leaning, industry-specific tasks.

It will change the perception of outside departments toward IT

With the emergence of newer position descriptions in the information technology sector comes a greater understanding of the pivotal role IT professionals play in the day-to-day operations of a company as well as their importance in the workforce of the future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of computer and information managers can be expected to grow by as much as 12 percent from 2016 to 2026. This can be attributed to the gradual move to digital platforms, increasing the need for workers proficient in collecting, managing and protecting data and network information.

The workforce of the future will be one in which man and machine work in lock-step to ensure greater efficiency and, ultimately, ROI. The results of this latest technology boom will drive further research and development into automation and drive professional development into more technologically-savvy areas than ever before.