The robots are coming for your office – The Verge

As the editor-in-chief of The Verge, I can theoretically assign whatever I want. However, there is one topic I have failed to get people at The Verge to write about for years: robotic process automation, or RPA.

Admittedly, its not that exciting, but its an increasingly important kind of workplace automation. RPA isnt robots in factories, which is often what we think of when it comes to automation. This is different: RPA is software. Software that uses other software, like Excel or an Oracle database.

On this weeks Decoder, I finally found someone who wants to talk about it with me: New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose. His new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, has just come out, and it features a lengthy discussion of RPA, whos using it, who it will affect, and how to think about it as you design your career.

What struck me during our conversation were the jobs that Kevin talks about as he describes the impact of automation: theyre not factory workers and truck drivers. Theyre accountants, lawyers, and even journalists. If you have the kind of job that involves sitting in front of a computer using the same software the same way every day, automation is coming for you. It wont be cool or innovative or even work all that well itll just be cheaper, faster, and less likely to complain. That might sound like a downer, but Kevins book is all about seeing that as an opportunity. Youll see what I mean.

Okay, Kevin Roose, tech columnist, author, and the only reporter who has ever agreed to talk to me about RPAs. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kevin Roose, youre a tech columnist at The New York Times and you have a new book, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, which is out now. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you for having me.

Youre ostensibly here to promote your book, which is great. And I wanna talk about your book. But theres one piece of the book that I am absolutely fascinated by, which is this thing called robotic process automation. And Im gonna do my best with you on this show, today, to make that super interesting.

But before we get there, lets talk about your book for a minute. What is your book about? Because I read it, and it has a big idea and then theres literally nine rules for regular people to survive. So, tell me how the book came together.

So, the book is basically divided into two parts. And the first part is basically the diagnosis. Its sort of, what is AI and automation doing today, in the economy, in our lives, in our homes, in our communities? How is it showing up? Who is it displacing, who is at risk of losing career opportunities or, you know, other things to these machines? What do we think about the arguments that this is all gonna turn out fine, whats the evidence for that? And the second half of the book is really the sort of practical advice piece, thats the nine rules that you mentioned.

And so it was my attempt to basically say, What can we do about AI and automation? Because I think you and I have been to dozens of tech conferences, and theres always some talk about AI and automation and jobs. And some people are very optimistic, some people are very pessimistic, but at the end theres always this chart that shows how many jobs could be displaced by automation in the next 10 years. And then the talk ends.

[Laughs]

Everyone just goes to lunch, you know? And its like, Okay, but... Im sitting there like, What do I do? I am a journalist, I work in an industry that is employing automation to do parts of my job; what should I, what should anyone, do to prepare for this? So, I wanted to write that, because I didnt see that it existed anywhere.

You just said, Were journalists, its an industry that employs automation to do parts of our job. I think that gets kinda right to the heart of the matter, which is the definition of automation, right?

I think when most people think of automation, they think of robots building cars and replacing factory workers in Detroit. You are talking about something much broader than that.

Yeah. I mean, thats sort of the classic model of automation. And still, every time theres a story about automation and I hate this, and its like my personal vendetta against newspaper and magazine editors every time you see a story about automation, theres always a picture of a physical robot. And I get it. Most robots that we think of from sci-fi are physical robots. But most robots that exist in the world today, by a vast majority, are software.

And so, what youre seeing today in corporate environments, in journalism, in lots of places, is that automation is showing up as software, that does parts of the job that, frankly, I used to do. My first job in journalism was writing corporate earnings stories. And thats a job that has been largely automated by these software products now.

So an earnings story is, just to put in sort of an abstract framework, a company releases its earnings, those earnings are usually in a format, because the SEC dictates that earnings are released in a format.

You say, Okay, heres the earnings per share, here is the revenue. Heres what the consensus analyst estimates were. They either beat the earnings or didnt. You can just write a script that makes that a story, you dont really need a person in the mix because theres almost no analysis to that. Right?

Right. And thats not even a very hard form of automation. I mean, that technology existed years ago, because its very much like filling in Mad Libs. You know, its like, Put the share price here, put the estimate here, put the revenue here.

But now, what were seeing with GPT-3 and other language models that are based on machine learning, is that its not just Mad Libs anymore. These generated texts are getting much better, theyre much more convincing and compelling. Theyre much more original, theyre not just sort of repeating things that theyve picked up from other places. So I think well see a lot more AI in journalism in the coming years.

So, we cover earnings at The Verge, we do it with a very different lens than a business publication, but we pay attention to a lot of companies. We care about their earnings, we cover them. If I could hire the robot to write the first two paragraphs of an earnings story for a reporter, I think all of my reporters would be like, Great. I dont wanna do that part. I wanna get to the fun part where Tim Cook on the call said something shocking about the future of the Mac. Right? And thats the part of the story thats interesting to us, anyway.

It seems like a lot of the automation story is doing jobs that are really boring, that people dont necessarily like to do. The tension there is, Well, shouldnt we automate the jobs that people dont like to do?

Yeah, this is the argument for automation in the workplace, is that all the jobs that are automatable are repetitive and boring and people dont wanna be doing them anyway. And so thats what youll hear if you call up a CEO of a company that sells automating software, I mean, RPA (robotic process automation) software. And thats what I heard over and over writing this book. But its a little simplistic, because automation can also take away the fun parts of peoples jobs that they enjoy.

Theres a lot of examples of this through history, where a factory automates, and the owners of the factory are like, This is great for workers, they hated lugging big pieces of steel and so now well have machines do that and theyll be able to do the fun and creative parts of the job. And then they install the automation and the robots, and it turns out that the workers dont like it because that was part of the job that they enjoyed. It wasnt necessarily lugging the pieces of steel, but was the camaraderie that built around that. And the downtime between big tasks.

Ideally, it would be the case that automation only took away the bad and boring and dull parts of peoples jobs, but in practice thats not always how it works. And now, with things like RPA, were seeing automation that is designed not just to replace one task or two tasks, but is really designed to replace an entire humans workload. The RPA companies now are selling what they call digital workers.

So instead of automating earnings reports, you can automate entry-level corporate journalism. Or you can automate internal communications. There are various ways that this is appearing in the corporate world. But I think theres a gap between what the sort of utopian vision of this is, and how its actually being put into practice.

Lets talk about RPA. Im very excited. Youre the only person whos ever wanted whos ever volunteered an hour of their life to talk about RPA with me. So, RPA is robotic process automation, which is an incredible name. In my opinion, made to sound as dull as possible.

Its like ASMR, if you wanna fall asleep you could just read a story about RPA.

[Laughs] The first time anyone told me about RPA, it was a consultant at a big consulting firm, and they were like, Our fastest growing line of business is going into hospitals and insurance companies where they have an old computer system, and it is actually cheaper and easier for us to replace the workers who use the old computer system, than it is to upgrade the computer system.

So, we install scripts that automate medical billing, and are basically KVM switches, so keyboard-video-mouse switches that use an old computer, like they click on the buttons. The mouse moves around and clicks on the old computer system, and that is faster and easier to replace the people, than it is to migrate the data out of the old system into a new system. Because everyone knows how complicated and expensive that is, and this is our fastest-growing line of business.

And I thought that was just the most dystopian thing Id ever heard. But then it turns out to be this massive industry that has grown tentacles everywhere.

Yeah, its amazing. I mean, my introduction to this world was sort of the same as yours. I was talking to a consultant. I was actually in Davos. Thats not my favorite way to start a story.

[Laughs]

But well go with it. And in Davos, you know, its this big conference. I call it the Coachella of capitalism. Its like a week-long festival of rich people and heads of state. The main drag, the promenade, is all corporate-sponsored buildings and tents and, you know, corporations rent out restaurants and turn them into sort of branded hang-out zones for their people and guests during the week. And by far the biggest displays on the promenade the year that I went were from consulting companies. Consulting companies like Deloitte and Accenture and Cognizant and Infosys, and all these companies that are doing massive amounts of business in RPA, or what they sometimes refer to as digital transformation. Thats sort of a euphemism.

They were spending millions of dollars and bringing in millions of dollars. And it was like, What is going on here? Like, What are these people actually selling? And it turns out that a lot of what theyre selling is stuff thatll plug into your Oracle database, thatll allow it to talk to this other software suite that you use. The kind of human replacement that youre talking about. Its very expensive to rebuild your entire tech stack if youre an old-line Fortune 500 company. But its relatively cheap to plug in an RPA bot thatll take out, you know, three to five humans in the billing department.

One of the things in your book that you mention, you call this boring bots. And you go into the process by which, yeah, you dont show up to work one day and theres a robot sitting at your desk. As a company grows and scales, it just stops hiring some of these people. It lets their jobs get smaller and smaller, it doesnt give them pathways up.

I see that very clearly, right? Like if their entire job is pasting from one Excel database, one Excel spreadsheet to another Excel spreadsheet all day, they might themselves just write a macro to do it. Why wouldnt you as a company be like, Were just gonna automate that? But all that other stuff in an office is the stuff that youre saying is important. The social camaraderie, the culture of a company. Is that even on the table for these digital transformation companies?

Its not really what theyre incentivized to think about. I mean, these consulting firms get brought in to cut costs. And cut costs pretty rapidly. And so thats their mandate and thats what theyre doing. Some of the way that theyre doing that is by taking out humans. Theyre also streamlining processes so that maybe you can reorg some of the people who used to work in accounts payable into a different division, give them something to do. But a big piece of the sales pitch is like, you can do as much or more work with many fewer people. And I talked to one consultant in Davos, and Im sorry, this is the last time I will ever mention Davos on this podcast.

Im putting your over/under on Davos mentions at five.

[Laughs] Its like the worst name drop in the world. But I talked to one consultant and he said that executives were coming up to him and saying, How can I basically get rid of 99 percent of the people that I employ? Like the target was not, How do we automate a few jobs around the edges? How do we save some money here and here? It was like, Can we wipe out basically the entire payroll?

And Is that plausible? And how do we get there as quickly as possible?

How big is the total RPA market right now?

Its in the billions of dollars. I dont know the exact figure, but the biggest companies in this are called UiPath and Automation Anywhere and there are other companies in this space, like Blue Prism. But just UiPath alone is valued at something like $35 billion and is expected to IPO later this year. So, these are large companies that are doing many billions of dollars in revenue a year, and theyre working with most of the Fortune 500 at this point.

And the actual product they sell, is it basically software that uses other software?

A lot of it is that. A lot of it is, this bot will convert between these two file formats or itll do sort of basic-level optical character recognition so that you can scan expense reports and import that data into Excel, or something like that. So, a lot of it is pretty simple. You know, a lot of AI researchers dont even consider RPA AI, because so much of it is just like static, rule-based algorithms. But a lot of them are starting to layer on more AI and predictive capability and things like that.

So you get some that are, you know, this plugs into your Salesforce and allows it to talk to this other program that maybe is a little bit older. Some of it is converting between one currency and another. But then there are these kind of digital workers, like you can hire Im making air quotes you can hire a tax auditor, who you just install, its a robot, and theoretically that can do the work that a person whose job title was tax auditor, did before.

So lets say I run like a mid-size manufacturing company, Im already thinking about Okay, on the line, there are lots of jobs that are dangerous or difficult or super repetitive, and I can run my line 24 hours a day, if I just put a robot on there. Then Im looking at my back office and Im saying, Oh, Ive got a lot of accountants and tax lawyers, and, I dont know, invoice preparers and all these people just doing stuff. I wanna hire Automation Anywhere, to come in and replace them. What does that pitch look like from the RPA company?

Well, I went to a conference for Automation Anywhere. This was pre-pandemic when conferences were still a thing.

And, you know, there were executives on stage talking to an audience of corporate executives and telling them that they could save between 20 and 40 percent of their operating costs by automating jobs in their back and middle offices. And so that pitch, you know, some companies might save less than that, some companies might save more than that, but thats the sales pitch: You can be more productive, you can free up workers to focus on higher-value tasks. Oh, and also you can shave 20 to 40 percent off your operating budget.

And so they would come in and they would assess, okay, you use Salesforce, you use an old database, you use some other program, right? I mean, at the end of the day back office work is people sitting down in front of a Windows PC and using it. So theyre like, which of these tasks are repetitive?

Yeah. Which are repetitive? What are the steps involved? There are some stories that Ive heard of people being sort of asked to train their robot replacements.

To kind of like, walk the RPA vendor or the consultant through the steps of their jobs so that, that can then be programmed into a script. So theres a lot of that, but theres also sort of reimagining processes and like, Do you really need people in three separate offices touching this piece of paper or could it be one person and a bot? I think part of what they market as digital transformation, is just going in and asking people, What outdated stuff are you using and how could we modernize that a little bit?

One of the themes here is that maybe the entire national political and cultural conversation about automation is pointed at blue-collar work. Right? Its a deindustrialized society, we dont make a lot of things here. Blue-collar workers are hurting all over America. You are talking very much about white-collar workers in corporate America getting replaced by, I mean, lets be honest, very fancy Windows scripting programs.

Yeah, thats where the sort of excess is in the economy. I mean, if you go into a factory today, theyre very lean. Most of the jobs in factories that could be automated were automated many years ago. And especially if you go to places like China, I mean, therere factories that have very few humans at all, its mostly robots. So there isnt a lot of excess there to trim.

On the other hand, a lot of white-collar workplaces are still brimming with people in the back office who are doing these kinds of repetitive tasks. And so thats sort of the strike zone right now. If you are doing repetitive tasks in a corporate environment, in a back office somewhere, your job is not long for this world. But now theres also some more advanced AI that can do kind of more repetitive cognitive work.

One example I talk about in the book is theres a guy I met, whos making essentially production planning software. So this would be not replacing the people in the factories who are working on the assembly line, itd be replacing their bosses who tell them, Okay, this part needs to be made in this quantity, on this day, on this machine. And then, you know, Two days later were gonna switch to making this part and we need this many units, and they need to go to this part of the warehouse.

All that used to be done by supervisors. And now that work can be mostly automated too. So its not purely the kind of entry-level data clerks that are getting automated, its also their bosses in some cases.

That feels like I could map it to a pretty familiar consumer story. Youve got a factory, its got some output. Its almost like a video game, right? Youve got a factory, its got some output, you need to make X, Y, and Z parts in various quantities and you need to deliver on a certain time. And to some extent, your job is to play tower defense and just fill all the bins at the right time. Or you could just play against the computer and the computer will beat you every time. Thats what that seems like. It seems very obvious that you should just let the computer do it.

Totally. And thats the logic that a lot of executives have. And I dont even know that thats the wrong logic. Like I dont think we should be preserving jobs that can be automated just to preserve jobs. The concern, I think I, and some other folks who watch this industry have, is that this type of automation is purely substitutive.

So in the past weve had automation that carried positive consequences and negative consequences. So the factory machines put some people out of their jobs, but they created many more jobs and they lowered the cost of the factories goods and they made it more accessible to people and so people bought more of them. And it had this kind of offsetting effect where you had some workers losing their jobs, but more jobs being created elsewhere in the economy that those people could then go do.

And the concern that the economists that Ive talked to had, was that this kind of RPA, like replacing people in the back office, like its not actually that good.

Its not the good kind of automation that actually does move the economy forward. Its kind of this crappy, patchwork automation that purely takes out people and doesnt give them anything else to do. And so I think on a macroeconomic level, the problem with this kind of automation is not actually how advanced it is, its how simple it is. And if we are worried about the sort of future of the economy and jobs, we should actually want more sophisticated AI, more sophisticated automation that could actually create sort of dynamic, new jobs for these people who are displaced, to go into.

One of the things I think about a lot is, yeah, a lot of white-collar jobs are pretty boring, theyre pretty repetitive. One of my favorite TikTok paths to go down is Microsoft Excel TikTok. And theres just a lot of people who are bored at work who have come up with a lot of wild ways to use Excel and they make TikToks about it. And its great. And I highly recommend it to anyone.

But their jobs are boring. Like the reason they have fodder for their TikTok careers is because Excel is boring and theyve made it entertaining. Those jobs, apart from the social element, are sort of unfulfilling, but at the same time, those are the people who might catch mistakes, might come up with a new way of doing something, might flag a new idea. Is that cost baked into the automation puzzle?

No. And in fact, Ive heard some stories from companies that did a big RPA implementation, you know, took out a bunch of workers, and then had to start hiring people back because the machines were making mistakes and they werent catching errors and the quality suffered as a result. So I think theres a danger of overselling the benefits of this kind of automation to these companies. I think some of the firms that are doing this, its a little more snake oil than real innovation.

So yeah, I think there is a danger of kind of over-automating. But I think the problem is that executives in a lot of companies, and I would say this applies largely outside of tech, this is largely in your beverage companies, hotel chains, Fortune 500 companies that maybe are running on a little bit of outdated technology.

I think the executives at those companies have come to view labor as purely a cost center. Its like, youre optimizing your workforce the same way that you would optimize your factory production. Youre trying to do things as efficiently as possible and I dont think theres a lot of appreciation for the benefit that even someone like an Excel number cruncher could have in the organization. Or maybe if you retrain that person to do something different, they could be more productive and more valuable to the organization.

But right now its just a numbers game. Theyre trying to hit next quarters targets and if automating 500 jobs in the back office is the way to do that, then thats what theyre gonna do.

You just brought up retraining. In the book youre not so hot on retraining. You dont think it has a lot of benefits. How does that play out?

Well, the data just isnt there on retraining. I mean, this is the sort of go-to stock response when you ask politicians or corporate executives, what do we do about automation and AI displacing jobs? And theres re-skilling, theres up-skilling.

Theres telling journalists to learn to code.

Right, theres telling journalists to learn to code. [laughing]

And like, you know, you hear these heartwarming stories about coal miners who got laid off and then went to coding bootcamp and became Python engineers, and started doing front-end software development. But those are the exception rather than the rule. Theres a lot of evidence that re-skilling programs actually dont have a long-term positive impact on the people who go through them, in economic terms. And some of that is probably, you know, about the kind of humans who are participating in them.

If you are a coal miner, your skill set is maybe not well-matched to be a software engineer. Its not that theyre not smart enough to do it, its that they frankly sometimes dont want to do it. Its not rewarding in the same way that the old job was. So the long-term benefit of these re-skilling programs is still something that we dont have a lot of evidence for. And theres been some estimates that say private sector re-skilling, companies retraining their own workers, thereve been some estimates that something like only one out of every four private sector workers can be profitably retrained.

So were really talking about something that needs to happen at the federal level if its gonna happen at all. And right now theres no momentum on that from either side of the aisle in Washington, to do any kind of federal retraining program.

The politician who comes to mind, first and most clearly in this conversation is obviously, Andrew Yang, who ran in the Democratic primary. He only talked about automation, basically. Hes advocated for universal basic income because he says automation is coming for all of our jobs. Is his approach more focused on the boring bot white-collar automation? Or is it at the manufacturing level?

No. And I think this is a place where he and I disagree. I mean, I like Andrew. I think he was right on a lot, but I think, you know, when hes talking on the trail about automation, hes largely talking about blue-collar automation. He talks a lot about truck drivers and manufacturing workers and even retail workers. And Im sort of sold on this idea that those industries are actually not the issue right now; the more pressing and urgent issue is white-collar automation.

And I think something like self-driving trucks is a great example of something that I am not as worried about as he is, because absolutely there will be self-driving trucks, and absolutely some truck drivers will lose their jobs. And the same goes for self-driving cars and, you know, taxi drivers and delivery drivers. I mean, theres going to be disruption there, but those are actually like gigantic technological achievements.

They will unlock huge new industries. I mean, you can just imagine, when there are self-driving cars, there will be self-driving hotels and restaurants and gyms, and therell be all kinds of jobs popping up for people who are making and selling these cars, who are repairing them, who are programming them, who are developing the hospitality around them. Its like, theres gonna be a lot of dynamism in that industry. So while, yes, it will crush some jobs, it will also save lives because itll be safer than the human drivers and itll open up new opportunities for people. So thats an area where Im actually not as pessimistic as Andrew Yang is.

What do you think about universal basic income?

I think its a pretty good idea. I mean, what were learning now with the stimulus checks is that giving people direct cash transfers is a really good idea in times when things are perilous and you need to give people a way to stay afloat. And there are other ideas that I think are wise too. I mean right now the tax rate for labor is a lot higher than for capital and for equipment. So companies are actually financially incentivized to automate more jobs because they get taxed less on money that they spend on robots versus on employing humans. So I think equalizing those tax rates could be a way to deal with this on a policy level.

But ultimately I think we have a long way to go on any of this stuff. There arent really a lot of politicians agitating for this except for Andrew Yang. So I think my goal is not to give people perfect policy recommendations. Im assuming some sort of stasis on the government level, and Im trying to convince people that its in their interest to take this into their own hands and come up with their own plans. Because I dont think the cavalry are coming.

One of the things that I have talked about, on maybe every episode of the show is how trends have accelerated in the pandemic. And obviously were moving to remote work, were out of offices. Even maybe three years ago, I was at a Microsoft event and I saw Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. And he was talking about all the things they were doing, and at the end hes like, And I just heard about this robotic process automation. It sounds amazing.

And now its like, oh, everyones doing it. Microsoft is in that business. He went from, I thought it was interesting to, If youre writing robots to use Excel, were gonna write the robots for you. That is a huge business. Thats a great business for Microsoft to be in. Googles doing it. You mentioned the other two companies that are already big. How much has the pandemic accelerated this curve?

A huge amount. I mean, I talked to a bunch of consultants who get these calls to come in and automate, you know, the call center or the finance department at big companies. And they said, there are basically two reasons why things have accelerated. One is that, I think, the pandemic has created a lot more demand for certain types of services and goods and created some supply chain issues. And so companies actually need to automate parts of their operations just to keep up with the demand.

But they also mention that theres been this kind of political cover that the pandemic gave the executives, because a lot of this technology, the RPA technology, is not new. Like this has been around. Its not sophisticated, its not mind-blowing in its complexity. But its fairly obviously displacing workers, and so a lot of executives have resisted it because, you know, it doesnt save them that much money, its not that much more productive or accurate than the humans doing those jobs, and if they implement RPA in normal times, workers get freaked out. Theres a backlash, maybe the mayor of their city calls and asks them why theyre automating jobs. Its a political headache in the instances when it happens publicly.

But during COVID theres been no real backlash to that. In fact, customers want automation because it lets them get goods and services without coming into contact with humans who might potentially be sick. So it kind of freed up executives to do the kind of RPA automation that they had been wanting to do and have been capable of doing for years. And so the consultants I talked to said, Yeah, were fielding calls from a lot of people who are saying, Yeah, lets do that automation project we talked about a couple years ago. Now is the right time.

Youre gonna come into our back office, while everyones out of the office, and figure out which accountants we dont need anymore.

Exactly, and you know, theres some precedent for this. I mean, economic disruption is often when big changes happen in the workplace. Youve already seen millions of jobs disappearing during the pandemic, and some of those jobs might not come back. It might just be that these companies are able to operate with many fewer people.

So youve called them boring bots. You say the technology is not so sophisticated. The industry calls it RPA. Like, theres a lot of pressure on making this seem not the most technologically sophisticated or exciting thing. It comes with a lot of change, but Im wondering, are there any stories of RPA going horribly wrong?

Im just imagining like, I think the most consumer-facing automation is, you call the customer support line and you go through the phone tree. It makes all the sense in the world on paper: if all I need is the balance of my credit card, I should just press 5 and a robot will read it to me, but like I just want to talk to a person every time. Because that phone tree never has the options I want or its always confused or something is wrong. There has to be a similar story in the back office where the accounting software went completely sideways and no one caught it, right?

Yeah, I mean, theres several stories like that in the book. Theres a trading firm called Knight Capital that had an algorithm go haywire and it lost millions of dollars in milliseconds. There was actually just a story in the financial markets I forget who it was, it was one of the big banks accidentally wired hundreds of millions of dollars to someone else and couldnt get it back. And so it was just like, they just lost that. Im sure that automation had some role in that, but that might have been a human error.

But there are also lower-level instances of this going haywire. One of the examples I talk about in the book is this guy Mike Fowler, who is an Australian entrepreneur who came up with a way to automate T-shirt design. So, I dont know if you remember like five or six years ago, but there were all these auto-generated T-shirts on Facebook that were advertised. So, you know, itd be like, Kiss me, Im a tech blogger who loves punk rock. You know, and those would just be like Mad Libs, you know?

Hang on, I gotta buy a T-shirt.

[Laughing] Or like, My other car is a flying bike, or whatever. You know, it was just the weirdest, most nonsensical combinations of demographic targeting IDs, like plugged into T-shirt designs and uploaded to the internet. And Mike Fowler was one of the people who was making that, and he pioneered this algorithm that would take, you know, sort of catchphrases, and plug words into them and then automatically generate the designs and list the SKUs on Amazon and make the ads for Facebook.

And so he made a lot of money doing this, and then one day it went totally wrong because he hadnt cleaned up the word bank that this algorithm drew from. So there were people noticing shirts for sale on Amazon that were saying things like Keep calm and hit her, or, Keep calm and rape a lot. Like just words that he had forgotten to clean out of the database, and so as a result, his store got taken down. He lost all his business. He had to change jobs, like it was a traumatic event for him. And thats a colorful example but there are, Im sure, lots of more mundane examples of this happening at places that have implemented RPA.

Is that cost baked in? Im imagining, you know, the mid-sized bottling firm in the Midwest and the slick top five consulting companies selling RPA, Everythings gonna be great. Then they leave. The software is going sideways. No one really knows how to use it. Like, is that all baked into the cost? Is that just, the consulting company gets to come back in and charge you more money to fix it?

I think thats how its going a lot of the time. The consulting companies end up sort of playing a kind of oversight role with the bots when they malfunction. Because there just isnt a whole lot of tech expertise in a lot of these companies, and certainly not for things like this. So, yeah, the consulting companies are making money hand over fist on this. Theres no question about it. And this has been a transformative line of business for them because its actually like, its not that hard, frankly.

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The robots are coming for your office - The Verge