Before COVID-19 stole the headlines, there was an increasingly urgent conversation growing across multiple industries regarding the shift of workplace demographics that lay a few years ahead. The wave of baby boomers entering their retirement years was bringing anxieties of a (temporary) labor shortage to employer’s minds, and many company owners planned to turn to automation as a possible solution. COVID-19, and the paradoxical labor shortage it’s left behind, has only increased the urgency.
Quickly, urgency turned to investment, and automation has remained an owner’s top choice. Already, experts like ARK Investment Management were predicting that automation could add roughly 1.2 trillion to the GDP, a 64% increase across the next five years. Demand for robots and other automation strategies have increased dramatically throughout the pandemic. Below are a few reasons why:
Deep learning will change every industry. The ability of AI to collect, analyze, and maximize the insights available in consumer data is positioned to completely reinvent the way almost every company works. Some experts suggest that AI-empowered machine learning could add $30 trillion to global market equity in the next 15 to 20 years. Working smarter mitigates the need to work harder; with better insights, companies can mitigate the gaps in data analytics, marketing, supply prediction, and other roles that have been left empty by the labor shortage so far.
Declining cost of technology. For many companies, increasing hourly wages has been one of the only ways to mitigate the loss of post-pandemic applicants. Compared to the exponentially-declining cost of smart technology, automation is becoming more and more financially attractive. Basic work and repetitive tasks can be replaced by robots and automated processes more reliably, in less time, and for a faster return on investment than unsuccessful hiring strategies; employers are newly aware of the imbalance in the automation vs. staffing cost equation.
Examples currently in the market?
Drones for delivery. Manna Drone Delivery has one foot firmly in the future, running real autonomous drone delivery across the European Union. Regulation in the United States lags behind, but Manna’s CEO has estimated that running drone deliveries is 90% cheaper than car-delivery services—American uptake can’t be far behind.
Those sentiments have been echoed by American experts who are watching the industry shift; Cathie Wood and the ARK Investments team predict an additional $275B in revenue to come from drone delivery, plus $50B from hardware sales and $12B from mapping revenue.
Those numbers, even if they were cut in half, would represent an incredible economic impact.
Smarter supply. The number of industry professionals who plan to delay their automation investments dropped this year from 41% to only 23%; the automation strategy is becoming a more popular solution for labor gaps in the supply chain space. Companies are using automation to replace repetitive tasks like simple movements, transport, loading, unloading, stacking etc. They’re also using it for better visibility on the floor, and smarter demand prediction moving forward.
Abstracted interactions. The marketing conversation is also getting smarter. The powers of AI, from social listening, customer-centric browsing, predictive analytics, and customer relations management, is taking marketing, advertising, and consumer management to another level that far exceeds the previous normal. 45% of AI adopters are reporting that they’ve secured a significant lead over their industry peers.