“Half of all work tasks will be handled by machines by 2025”. Predictions like these are usually overoptimistic. But this time, we can’t be too sure.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) conducted some interesting research spanning 300 of the world’s biggest companies and their collective eight million employees. Insightful stuff…

• Over 50% of employers expect to speed up the pace of automation – no surprise here!
• The “robot revolution” could create 97 million jobs worldwide but destroy almost as many. That’s a worry!

Currently around a third of all work tasks worldwide are handled by machines, with humans doing the rest, but by 2025 the balance is projected to shift substantially.

But, and it’s a big BUT, that’s only another 17% shift to achieve the WEF prediction (or to put it another way, another 25% of current manual tasks)… That seems like less hyperbole and more possibility.

Roles that rely on human skills such as advising, decision-making, reasoning, communicating and interacting will rise in demand. There should also be a “surge” in demand for workers to fill green economy jobs, and new roles in areas like engineering and cloud computing.

We tend to be over optimistic about the pace of change in society, but external “change agents” (like Coronavirus perhaps) are demonstrating an accelerating force . . .

This article by the BBC is a brief but thought provoking read. Is it FEAR or FAIR? You can judge here

Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.