Is automation poised to replace people?Politics and trade deals aside, I believe that technology innovation creates jobs in places you never thought there could be jobs before and enables people to take on more interesting, strategic work.

[Automation and blockchain have hugepotential to change business as we know it. Learn more in our related article, Blockchain: 3 big implications for your company.]

Heres an example. We have a new risk intelligence platform, which adds a credit limit recommendation, among other things, to our previous platform. In the past, companies would buy data from D&B, then look at the credit scores and make decisions about whether or not they were going to do business with that company based on the credit reports.

"This takes a step out of the process through automation, but it also delivers that data and that decision faster."

Now D&B is using internal analytics combined with our new product to deliver actual credit limit recommendations to the customer. This takes a step out of the process through automation, but it also delivers that data and that decision faster. So were bringing data and decisioning to places where its all being usedand where it can help our customers drive more revenue. Which creates more jobs.

In essence, weve opened up the entire product through APIs that the customers can integrate into their own systems so that automation flows straight through to whatever system theyre using. In addition, we are actively going out and partnering with some of the major software platforms that can use these systems, and bringing those credit scores and intelligence and decisioning right into those interactions.

Now our customers dont have to have their IT crews go and implement APIs with us because were partnering with that accounting platform. Which means they can deploy that staff to more strategic and interesting work.

Read more:

Automation's power: Streamlining for speed - The Enterprisers Project