Daily Archives: March 31, 2022

Koidra, an intelligent automation (IA) platform company based out of Seattle, has raised $4.5 million in its seed round. Ospraie Ag Science (OAS) led this round of funding, with participation from Amritam Holdings, Cavallo Ventures, and Foothill Ventures.

Koidra was founded by the lead of Microsoft Research's winning team at theinauguralAutonomous Greenhouse Challenge. They were the only team to outperform expert Dutch growers, and they also demonstrated the massive yield and profitability improvements achievable through intelligent greenhouse automation.

Intelligent automation combines multiple disciplinessuch as artificial intelligence, mathematics, and physicsto transform real-time data into useful decisions. Koidra delivers "decision intelligence" to their clients for improved operational decision making, a top technology trend identified by analyst firm Gartner. Besides operational efficiency gains, Koidra solutions also advance manufacturing businesses on their journey to achieving hyperautomation, another strategic technology trend identified by Gartner.

For more information:Koidrawww.koidra.ai

More here:

Koidra raises $4.5 million funding to bring automation to greenhouses - hortidaily.com

CPGS Walk a Fine Line of Profitability and Loss

When it comes to profitability, CPGs dont have much wiggle room to begin with, let alone small and midsized CPGs looking to establish and maintain shelf space in a hypercompetitive retail environment. And deductions management plays a big role in protecting profitability.

Validating deductions and managing discrepancies with retailers is challenging. It requires tedious research and accounting, and puts hard-earned retailer relationships at risk. All too often, accounts receivable (AR) teams find themselves overloaded with manually processing thousands of deductions in multiple retailer formats, leaving no time for recovery, let alone prevention.

That thing is automation. Introducing automation and artificial intelligence to deductions management can protect profit margins by transforming the manual deductions management process from beginning to end.

From the moment CPGs receive deductions from retailers, automation can be leveraged to extract information and prioritize claims. This seemingly simple step can save analysts loads of front-end time, and as many retailers have strict dispute windows, this time could be the difference in cash collected or left on the table.

After deductions are quickly coded, analysts can continue to leverage automation to validate claims. Validation requires a collection of supporting documents, such as additional invoices, receipts, Proof of Delivery, and Bill of Lading. These documents are often housed in different places, and AR analysts work with other internal stakeholders to track down and collect them. This back-and-forth often happens via email, creating a convoluted string of communication and unorganized handling of important documents that cash recovery depends on. If the deduction is invalid, even more back-and-forth may be necessary to prepare the dispute.

Automated deductions management solutions provide a single source of truth for all documents and information, helping simplify this hectic process. Many solutions also allow multiple users to access a shared dashboard providing organized workflows, clear accountability, and seamless communication between teams. Thats a powerful capability, and the benefits of AI and automation dont stop there.

Arguably, even more critical than invalid deductions are valid deductions. With newfound time from automating validation and parts of the dispute process, AR analysts can leverage data and insights made possible from a centralized system for all deductions information. This data can inform internal inefficiencies and, paired with improved cross-team collaboration, CPGs can prevent future deductions from happening in the first place. For example, packaging errors or shipping delays may be the root cause of many deductions, and AR teams can work with operations to correct them.

Beyond prevention, automated deductions management solutions can deliver powerful insights into retailer performance that allow CPGs to focus on improving and nurturing these valuable relationships. Insights into how specific retailers are trending when it comes to deductions can also enable teams to make informed decisions in unique circumstances, such as how to allocate limited product in a supply chain crisis. On the flip side, data can also reveal trends into how successfully AR teams recover cash from each retailer.

The value-add of automation is undeniable. From extraction, validation and recovery, to delivering insights to inform prevention, opportunities for improvement, and retailer relationships introducing data and automation to the deductions management process helps protect against margin erosion, increase productivity, and drive overall growth.

Dash Bibhudatta is the vice president and general manager, product, fintech at Inmar, a leading data platform company.

Go here to read the rest:

Data and Automation Are Key for Preventing Needless Margin Erosion - Total Retail

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Automation in Combined Heat and Power Market by Component, Control and Safety System: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global automation in combined heat and power market size was valued at $12.53 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $24.12 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 7.1% from 2021 to 2030. Combined heat and power (CHP) automation plays a significant role in energy management which include optimal coordination of turbines & boilers in order to minimalize production costs while maintaining environmental compliance. The automation system in a CHP plant covers the entire process, including the turbine island, boiler island, fuel handling, balance of plant, and auxiliary processes.

Growth of the global automation in combined heat and power market is anticipated to be driven by factors such as emphasis on industrial automation & optimum utilization of resources, and adoption of emerging technologies such as IoT and AI in industrial environments. In addition, emergence of the concept of connected enterprises boosts the overall market growth. However, lack of awareness among small scale industries acts as a major restraint for the global automation in the combined heat and power industry. On the contrary, a surge in demand from the Asia-Pacific region is expected to create lucrative opportunities for the automation in combined heat and power market.

The global automation in combined heat and power market is segmented on the basis of components, control and safety system, and region. By component, the market is classified into sensors, controllers, switches & relays, drives, and others. Depending on control and safety system, it is categorized into distributed control system, supervisory control & data acquisition system, systems instrumented systems, programmable logic controller, and human machine interface.

Companies Mentioned

KEY BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS

Market Dynamics

Drivers

Restraint

Opportunities

KEY MARKET SEGMENTS

By Component

By Control and Safety System

By Region

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/w9voyh

More:

$24.12 Billion Opportunities in the Automation in Combined Heat and Power Global Market, 2021-2030 by Component, Control and Safety System -...

For a while now, organisations have been approaching integration and automation separately, setting up teams with different capabilities and tools to integrate systems and automate processes.

But that should not be the case, according to Allan Teng, Workatos managing director and founder for Asia-Pacific and Japan, who says automation and integration are in fact two sides of the same coin.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Teng explains Workatos integration-led approach towards automation, why it makes sense for organisations, and how the company is tackling the Asia-Pacific market.

Can you tell us more about Workato and its heritage in the integration space?

Teng: Our founders have a very rich history in the integration space. They were the ones who started Tibco with products like the enterprise service bus. Fast-forward 30 years, and the biggest challenge with integration hasnt changed. Its still very technical and requires a huge undertaking. But what has changed is that employees now want things faster and easier, like they do with consumer apps.

Workato was started with the hypothesis that companies value the outcome of connecting data, processes and user experience. These are things that are intertwined and are not separate problems. Integration vendors may tell you that you have a data integration problem, while automation vendors may see the problem as a workflow and process issue.

Companies shouldnt have to buy different tools to solve their data problems. These could be ETL [extract, transform, load], API [application programming interface] management or iPaaS [integration platform-as-a-service] tools. And on the automation side, there are BPM [business process management] and RPA [robotic process automation] tools.

A distinguished Gartner analyst who joined us recently notes that integration and automation are in fact two sides of the same coin. And if companies address them in different ways, they will always have a piecemeal approach. The world has changed, and we want to look at things in a holistic way, where you connect all your systems so that they are well integrated, and then use this connectivity to automate business process and for user experience purposes. Thats what we call the integration-led automation approach.

When we started the company, one of our first use cases was around Salesforce to QuickBooks integration. But what we realised was that because our technology was easy to use, customers started connecting different applications such as Trello and other components to automate their processes.

Now we have customers like Grab that are using Workato for integration and automation. Another customer is Gainsight, which started using Workato for API use cases and later replaced its ETL tool with our platform.

But dont get me wrong, we also partner with RPA vendors like UiPath because they have done really well with automation. But the market has signalled that while automation is important, they also want more and thats why more RPA vendors are going into the integration space through mergers and acquisitions.

But merging two companies doesnt solve the problem. While it makes it easier to buy from a single source, companies time and time again have told us that they are not trying to look for a better RPA or integration tool.

We want to look at things in a holistic way, where you connect all your systems so that they are well integrated, and then use this connectivity to automate business process and for user experience purposes. Allan Teng, Workato

The value proposition of Workato is that we are one platform for both integration and automation. Its also easy to use when companies implement Workato, they expect it to be done within a month, with the first use case going live within a week.

But its not just the speed in building and maintaining integrations. Many IT organisations are starting to realise that they have become the biggest bottlenecks in their business. For them to provide more business value, they have to shift from integrating systems and being a service provider, to becoming more of a strategy and empowerment team.

For example, if HR wants to do integration work, why cant IT provide them with the tools to do it themselves? This was what happened at Scoot, the budget airline. Their HR was frustrated with IT, which needed nine months to integrate SaaS [software-as-a-service] applications like ServiceNow and Workday. With Workato, they could do it themselves in one to two months.

Finally, the most important thing is that Workato meets enterprise requirements and doesnt circumvent IT. So, when Scoot bought Workato, their IT team was involved and did their evaluations around things like security.

Can you elaborate on the benefits of a holistic platform like Workato compared to an integration platform with RPA capabilities?

Teng: On paper, those platforms can do everything, but in practice it is really hard. The biggest challenge is with skills and resources. In the past, you needed different sets of tools and skills for integration and automation, which make teams less nimble and harder to scale.

On the flipside, with Workato, you dont need to form different teams. In fact, most companies that choose Workato dont start with a Workato team. They start with training everybody on Workato, including those whose jobs do not involve coding. They train people who are managing applications like Salesforce and Workday. This alleviates the need to bring in different groups of people for a project.

I can tell you why we are so confident in this race. We have partnerships with tertiary institutions where the professors teaching Workato in their courses are not even from the IT schools. One HR professor is teaching Workato so that HR students can become tech-enabled. If 18-year-old students from non-technical backgrounds can use Workato to solve problems, I dont believe companies cant do it and thats why were so excited about this space.

What is the typical entry point for most of your customers in the APAC region?

Teng: Most companies start working with us in one area. Certis, for example, started using Workato as an SAP integration tool, so for the first couple of months, their CIO thought Workato was just about SAP integration. Then I had lunch with their CEO and showed them what we could do.

The entry point in this region is all over the place, to be honest. We get in wherever we can, but our strength has always been solving integration problems. For example, some of our customers have SAP systems that need to be integrated, while others want to have chatbots in Slack.

When we go to the market, we talk less about the technology and more about our value proposition for example, what it means to be able to automate the sales process so you can achieve revenues faster and the technology behind that. We dont really try to sell an integration or automation product. Most of the time we work with business teams to look at their objectives and how our technology fits in.

Could you give me a sense of your overall business in the region? How fast is the company growing and which industries are you more frequently engaged with? Are they mostly in the financial services industry?

Teng: Today we do very little business with financial services companies. We do a lot more in other industries because the biggest challenge with financial services firms is that they are slow to change their mindsets, even the most forward-looking ones. They are very heavily invested in legacy technology because they have to justify those investments.

We work with organisations that are under-served. Our strength today is in the technology space. Most of our customers are tech unicorns such as Gojek, Grab and Tokopedia. They are often the fastest adopters because they are not the kind of companies that will be afraid to say they made a wrong choice.

We also look at companies that have a public cloud mentality because you cant deploy Workato on-premise or in a private cloud. It is a fully SaaS platform, which is unacceptable to some companies. But that could change in the next three to five years, because companies will start to realise that they will be beaten by cloud-native competitors that are completely changing the game.

We are also starting to see more traditional customers, like airlines, property developers and shipping companies, with modern CIOs who will choose Workato 98% of the time. But if they are trying to maximise their existing investments, then we wont be able to get in until they start to realise that theyre moving too slowly.

What about telcos?

Teng: Our biggest challenge has historically been that we are only hosted in the US. We will have a Singapore datacentre in a couple of weeks. There was a telco where Workato won technology-wise, but there is one component, a local datacentre, which we dont have. Their CIO told me that if we had a local datacentre, he would choose Workato every single time. The same goes for the public sector, but once we have our Singapore datacentre, it shouldnt be an issue.

In the long term, do you think there will be less need for integration if business software suppliers start offering loosely coupled microservices of capabilities that can be bundled together to suit an organisations needs?

Teng: Its easier said than done. With so many applications out there, its not possible for software providers to build point-to-point integrations with every application. If all we do is integration and we cannot connect to every application, no one can. Instead, software providers are using the Workato platform to do the integrations.

Thats also our fastest-growing business because many technology companies cant do bespoke integrations for every enterprise customer beyond core integrations. Also, its hard for business users to understand what microservices are about. They care more about the process and tend to be more familiar with triggers and actions when doing integrations.

Read this article:

Why integration and automation are two sides of the same coin - ComputerWeekly.com

Asure Software Inc

AUSTIN, Texas, March 30, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asure Software, Inc., (Nasdaq: ASUR), a leading provider of cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) software solutions, today announced its new integrations with Automation Anywhere and Workato to maximize the speed, efficiency, and customer experience with automated processes.

These leading automation platforms provide Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities that accelerate Asures HCM platform integration, streamline workflows, and further automate the end-to-end processes of Asures Payroll, HR, Tax Management, and money-movement services.

The integration with Automation Anywhere allows RPA software bots to scale our resources, increase speed & accuracy, improve the customer experience, and ensure compliance and auditability. Asure is first building these bots to improve internal effectiveness and will soon offer a Bot Library to help its resellers take advantage of all these automation benefits.

The integration with Workato takes RPA to another level by providing advanced API integrations and workflows that enable more backend power to Asures automation strategy. These tools speed the onboarding process and make for a better customer experience due to seamless integration with front-end and back-end platforms.

Automating processes in Payroll, HR, Tax, and money-movement is dramatically improving our productivity and our customers experience all at the same time, said, Pat Goepel, Chairman, and CEO of Asure. The real beauty of automation isnt so much the time it saves but rather the possibilities it creates. By automating routine tasks, we get to re-deploy our workforce on more proactive, client-facing work that makes a huge impact on our clients ability to stay compliant and grow their business, added Goepel.

About Asure SoftwareAsure (Nasdaq: ASUR) is a leading provider of Human Capital Management (HCM) software solutions. We help small and mid-sized companies grow by assisting them in building better teams with skills to stay compliant with ever-changing federal, state, and local tax jurisdictions and labor laws, and better allocate cash so they can spend their financial capital on growing their business rather than back-office overhead expenses. Asures Human Capital Management suite, named Asure HCM, includes cloud-based Payroll, Tax Services, and Time & Attendance software as well as human resources (HR) services ranging from HR projects to completely outsourcing payroll and HR staff. We also offer these products and services through our network of reseller partners. Visit us at asuresoftware.com.

Story continues

About Automation AnywhereAutomation Anywhere is the No. 1 cloud automation platform, delivering RPA and process intelligence solutions across all industries globally to automate end-to-end business processes for the fastest path to enterprise transformation. The company offers the worlds only cloud-native platform combining RPA, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics to automate repetitive tasks and build enterprise agility, freeing up humans to pivot to the next big idea, build deeper customer relationships and drive business growth. For additional information, visit http://www.automationanywhere.com.

Automation Anywhere is a trademark/service mark or registered trademark/service mark of Automation Anywhere, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

About WorkatoWorkato is the operating system for today's fast-moving business. Recognized as a leader, Workato is the only enterprise automation platform that enables both business and IT to integrate their apps and automate even the most mission-critical workflows without compromising security and governance. Workato is trusted by over 6,000 of the world's top brands and fastest growing innovators.

Investor Relations ContactRandal RudniskiVice President, Investor Relations, Financial Planning & Analysis512-859-3562randal.rudniski@asuresoftware.com

See the original post:

Asure Accelerates Operating Scale with Advanced Robotic Process Automation (RPA) That Improves Customer Satisfaction, Speed, and Efficiency of Payroll...

The Computer Weekly Developer Network gets high-brow on low-code and no-code (LC/NC) technologies in an analysis series designed to uncover some of the nuances and particularities of this approach to software application development.

Looking at the core mechanics of the applications, suites, platforms and services in this space, we seek to understand not just how apps are being built this way, but also what shape, form, function and status these apps exist as and what the implications are for enterprise software built this way, once it exists in live production environments.

This piece is written by Art Harrison in his position as chief growth officer at Daylight Automation a company known for its workflow automation software and designed to tackle repetitive office processes.

Harrison writes as follows

Weve heard time and again how the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of many organisations. When lockdowns hit and employers had to enable a remote workforce, many invested in technologies that could help employees continue their jobs at home and still serve customers as needed. For some, those technologies were low-code/no-code platforms.

Low-code and no-code platforms have seen a rise, for the most part, due to their ability to enable teams to rapidly build solutions. They allow employees to transform processes that they use day-to-day into automated, digital experiences, helping to increase employee productivity and innovation.

Instead of inheriting technology that has been part of a year-long project, with low-code/no-code platforms, process owners and users are involved from the start. Theyre empowered to become citizen developers and understand the whats in it for me? factor from the outset, increasing the likelihood that the technology will be adopted something many organizations have struggled with in the past.

The technology investments large organisations make are usually to offset the cumbersome legacy systems they have to deal with. In a desire to automate core and non-core processes, companies have invested in tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and process mining, but theyre missing one key ingredient: structured data.

Without data that can power the aforementioned technologies, they dont serve their intended purpose.

For example, if OCR is used to extract customer data from a PDF there is still a possibility that the captured data will be inaccurate and will require manual intervention.

With a low-code/no-code platform, manual processes that tend to be error-prone turn into data capture tools that send structured data downstream. So, instead of RPA leveraging the wrong data that came from OCR, it has a clean slate to work with.

The rise of citizen developers and business technologists who are running with no-code solutions can make the IT function a bit weary. After all, theyre used to being the gatekeeper of all technology. When low-code no-code platforms are properly implemented by cross-functional teams, they should have the autonomy to launch new workflows and processes without IT over their shoulder but, that doesnt mean the governance model goes out the window.

With low-code (and in particular) no-code solutions, ITs role changes. They take on an influencing role and cultivate a governance model that works with citizen developers and cross-functional teams, instead of pushing a top-down approach.

Low-code and no-code solutions arent going to reduce head count or remove the need for developers. However, they will allow your sought-after software engineers to focus on larger, high-impact projects. The smaller, internal processes can be saved by low-code/no-code solutions, accelerating the digital transformation organisations have been seeking for years.

Read the rest here:

The low-no-code series Daylight Automation: The role of structured data & governance - ComputerWeekly.com

JSC

The death of the working class is an interesting question because one of the main reasons instigating the discourse on the end of work is deindustrialization and the end of blue-collar workers. What this misses is the globalization of value chains, the regionalization of industries, and the fact that to take one prominent industry there are today more auto workers worldwide than there were thirty years ago: far fewer in Italy, France, or the UK, but far more in China, India, and Latin America. Employment in the auto sector rose worldwide by 35 percent between 2007 and 2017. Take China, where employment in the sector rose 68 percent, to roughly 5 million workers in 2017, or Mexico, where employment doubled during the same period. At the same time, employment in the auto industry in France declined from 280,000 to 190,000 in the same period. Thats without taking into account the emergence of a battery value chain, whose effects on industrial employment are to be determined.

So, the death of the working class discourse is a Global North narrative, blind to the economic transformations of world capitalism. I use the theoretical framework of Beverly J. Silver, who says that capital faces two opposing forces. The first is the profitability crisis: capital searches for new countries where the labor force is cheaper, and new industries where it can invest, to counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The second force is working-class organization. Thats why it always seeks out disciplined and peaceful working classes in Global South countries. But it also creates the same contradictions in these other countries. So, while it invests in creating new industries and new working classes in other countries, it also creates new labor conflicts and demands.

In this sense, alongside the deindustrialization of Northern countries, there is an industrialization of Southern and Eastern ones. Slovakia has more production of vehicles per person than any other country in Europe. Then, in northwestern Europe, you have a tendency also to create new hubs of industrial workers; in the book I give the example of logistics, which is one of the fastest-growing sectors of industrial work in the rich countries. There is a small boom in the number of workers in this sector, where jobs are usually manual, very unskilled, and very poorly paid. In France, you have now 800,000 blue-collar workers in logistical hubs in the peripheries of big cities. One can also think of the UPS Worldport in Louisville, Kentucky, with 20,000 employees. This again reflects the idea that where capital invests, labor conflicts emerge. You have seen this in France, and you have seen this in northern Italy, where there was a wave of strikes by migrant workers in logistical hubs. That is a direct consequence of this development of logistics as an industrial sector, as was the auto industry a few years ago.

Alessandro Delfanti said that Amazon is the new Fiat. Im not sure if I entirely agree with that, because Fiat, now Stellantis, still exists. But the configuration of the workforce is somewhat similar. It means that there are young, unskilled, migrant, poorly paid, and highly concentrated workers in these new logistical hubs. And this is an explosive cocktail in a certain sense for the organization of the working class, and it could be a possible source of renewal also for the labor movement today.

Continued here:

No, Automation Isn't Going to Make Work Disappear - Jacobin magazine

DALLAS & TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Throughout release, name of EMEA Regional Sales Director should read: Thierry Guenoun (instead of Thierry Guenon).

The updated release reads:

EXPANSION OF BACKBOX CONTINUES AS NETWORK AUTOMATION BECOMES ESSENTIAL

Leading provider of network automation announces additions to leadership team and new global headquarters following 63% employee growth rate and 40% growth in recurring revenue in the last year

BackBox, a leading provider in network automation, security and management, today announced the appointment of Pete Morrison as Vice President of Sales; Thierry Guenoun as EMEA Regional Sales Director; and Jonathan Moore as Vice President of Marketing. Collectively, Morrison, Guenoun and Moore bring over 50 years of experience in the technology industry to their roles at BackBox, where they will lead teams tasked with expanding the companys global reach and supporting the rapidly increasing market demand for the companys network automation and security solution. In the last year, BackBox saw 40% growth in recurring revenue, 20% growth in bookings including new customers in the energy, financial and entertainment sectors across the U.S. and Europe, and greater than 95% customer retention.

In addition to the expansion of its leadership team, BackBox also announced its new global headquarters in Dallas, Texas which will support expansion plans in North America, as well as talent sourcing. The new U.S. headquarters will be BackBoxs second globally, with the other located in Tel Aviv, Israel serving the EMEA and APAC regions.

Since our funding round in October 2021, we have been aggressively adding talent to BackBox to support our rapid growth, said Andrew Kahl, CEO of BackBox. The significant increases in our customer portfolio particularly those in critical infrastructure sectors like energy and finance signal a burgeoning understanding of the importance of network health and security to companies of all sizes, in every region. Pete, Thierry and Jonathan each have a strong track record of success leading sales and marketing teams, specifically in IT infrastructure. They understand the challenges our customers and prospects face, and the role BackBox can play in solving those challenges.

Morrison brings over 30 years of industry experience to his role at BackBox. He previously served as Regional Sales Director at Splunk, where he led a team of sellers focused on aerospace and defense companies, and held leadership positions at Oracle and CA Technologies. Guenoun hails from Amdocs, where he designed and implemented complex Integrated Revenue and Customer Management Solutions for tier-1 communications service providers and media companies throughout EMEA in his role as Solution Architect. Throughout his 10 years of field experience, Guenoun has led initiatives in real-time charging, policy management and customer relationship management. Moore has been leading growth marketing initiatives for B2B software companies for 25 years, contributing to five acquisitions and two IPOs, including Webtrends, Tripwire, Jive Software and AWS Elemental. Most recently, Moore served as Vice President of Marketing for customer experience analytics vendor Topbox. Morrison, Guenoun and Moore will be instrumental in driving success at BackBox through brand awareness, customer acquisition and sales team leadership.

Morrison, Guenoun and Moore are the latest executives to join BackBoxs growing leadership team, following several appointments in late 2021, including Craig McDonald as Vice President of Product Management; Jim Burglin as Vice President of Customer Experience; Tony Lam as Chief Operating Officer; and Kathy Schneeberg as Vice President of Human Resources and People Operations. In total, BackBox grew employee headcount by 63% in 2021.

We are looking forward to our Dallas headquarters opening up new doors for talent sourcing in one of the biggest tech hubs in the U.S., continued Kahl. BackBox is in an accelerated growth period, and having dual headquarters in the U.S. and EMEA positions us to meet the heightened market demand and support our global customer base.

To learn more about BackBox or to join its growing team, please visit http://www.backbox.com.

About BackBox

BackBox is a market leader in network automation, security and management solutions. We help companies worldwide automate and streamline complex tasks, ensure network health and performance, achieve business continuity and do more with fewer resources. To learn more, visit http://www.backbox.com.

Link:

CORRECTING and REPLACING Expansion of BackBox Continues As Network Automation Becomes Essential - Business Wire

Autonomous trucks could one day replace more than 90% of all highway trucking, which could have a profound impact on as many as 500,000 long-haul truckers, a new study found.

Why it matters: Automation, and its potential impact on human labor, is a widespread concern for workers in many industries. While labor markets continually evolve, it often takes time for displaced workers to adapt to new jobs requiring different skills.

The big picture: Long-haul trucking is a grueling job, with a high turnover rate. Last year, the industry faced a record shortage of 80,000 drivers.

Driving the news: The study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University assessed the impact of autonomous trucking on operator-hours, depending on how the technology now being tested in Sun Belt states is deployed.

What they found: The impacts of automation might not happen all at once.

How it would work: Many automated trucking developers envision the use of transfer hubs, where cargo trailers would be handed off between humans and robots.

What they're saying: Drivers displaced by autonomous trucks could find work closer to home on short-haul routes, or even in newly created logistics jobs at transfer hubs, AT developers say.

See original here:

Automated trucks could replace up to 500,000 long-haul drivers - Axios

Lemonade ( LMND -6.60% ) has emerged as one of the more intriguing disruptors in the financial industry. It has targeted the insurance industry by using artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioral economics to streamline the application process, thus insuring its customers at lower cost.

However, Lemonade stock has experienced a huge decline as losses mount and investors question its ability to weather a crisis. Investors will need to take a closer look at the insurance stock to see whether Lemonade is the vehicle by which they can profit from insurance industry disruption.

Image source: Getty Images.

Lemonade began by selling renters insurance. It later branched out into homeowners, life, and pet insurance. Now, through a pending acquisition of Metromile, it will enter the auto market. It will stand out by charging different rates based on miles driven, and according to the company, Metromile saved its customers an average of 47% compared with their previous rates.

Indeed, automation made such an approach possible and now appears on track to make numerous insurance-related jobs obsolete. According to McKinsey, which also cited the Bureau of Labor Statistics and IPMUS USA, the trend will displace 33% of insurance sales agents by 2030.

Image sources: McKinsey, BLS, and IPMUS USA.

Lemonade relies heavily on bots and machine learning to attract customers, evaluate the risks of specific customers, and offer appropriate products. With bots taking responsibility for selling, evaluating, and closing deals with prospective customers, it could eventually eliminate the industry's need for expensive, commission-based sales agents.

However, the biggest worry in Lemonade's fourth-quarter results may leave insurance agents breathing easier about the future of their careers. The report showed a 96% gross loss ratio, the percentage of premiums paid to pay claims.

This is far above the 73% from the year-ago quarter and makes it nearly impossible to turn a profit. Worse, the higher loss ratio was not prompted by a spike in accident-related claims during the quarter. The company blamed the higher ratio on losses from previous quarters that it did not properly fund at the time. Such results may call into question whether its automated model can compete with traditional insurance products.

Those losses also widened the difference between revenue and net losses. In 2021, Lemonade had a net loss of $241 million on revenue of $128 million. While revenue rose 36% versus 2020 levels, losses climbed by 97% due to a 68% increase in expenses. Although losses are common for fast-growth start-ups, the increase in losses may become uncomfortable for investors.

Additionally, shareholders should expect little improvement. The company anticipates between $202 million and $205 million in revenue for 2022, a 58% increase at the midpoint. Still, it expects the adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) loss for 2022 to be between $275 million and $290 million, a 53% rise at the midpoint from the $184 million reported in 2021.

Given this disappointment, one might understand the share drop of almost 80% from the 52-week high. That decline took the price-to-sales ratio to 13, a level near all-time lows. Still, if Lemonade does not improve its execution, Lemonade may fail to attract new investors even with that significant discount.

The future careers of insurance sales agents may not look promising, but it remains unclear whether the long-term threat will come from Lemonade. Indeed, its AI-based model holds the potential to disrupt industry practices that have not changed in decades.

However, rising loss ratios not prompted by a major disaster event call its current business model into question. Moreover, revenue growth continues to bring increased losses, leaving no clear path toward eventual profitability.

Admittedly, if Lemonade can figure out how to replace agents with AI applications, it could return massive stock gains over time. Nonetheless, with the uncertainty surrounding this business, investors should only consider small, speculative positions if they choose to invest at all.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis even one of our own helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

See the rest here:

Automation Is Reducing Sales Agent Jobs: Is That a Reason to Buy Lemonade? - The Motley Fool