Category Archives: Automation

Sixteen months ago, GM stunned the automotive and tech world when it acquired Cruise Automation, a startup that makes autonomous car technology.

From outside appearances the two companies seemed well aligned as Cruise ramped up and soon began testing self-driving Chevy Bolt electric vehicles in San Francisco and later, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

But relationships are complicated and messy. It turns out that the transition from small startup to subsidiary of one of the world's largest automakers wasn't so effortless, Kyle Vogt , CEO and co-founder of Cruise Automation said on stage at Fortune's annual Brainstorm TECH event in Aspen, Colo.

"Working inside of a large company has not been smooth sailing," Vogt said on stage at the Brainstorm Tech event. "It took us probably six months to a year to really figure out how to work well together and to achieve what we have now, which is mutual respect."

Vogt admitted that he and the rest of the Cruise employees were probably viewed as the young jerks walking into GM and telling people how to do their jobs.

Im sure some people thought that at first," Vogt said in response to a question from senior writer Erin Griffith. "It probably went way too far in that direction when we first got started."

That has since changed, as employees at the once-small startup and the giant automaker recognized and respected the expertise that each company brought to the relationship.

"We identified that the folks with decades of experience building cars really know what theyre talking about when it comes to assembly plants and how they put things together," Vogt said. "Over time I think weve developed a mutual understanding and figured out when it comes to software thats really complex and needs lots of cycles of iteration to achieve the level of perfection you need to replace a human driver that we should leverage Silicon Valley talent and the people at Cruise to do some of that work."

Vogt said Cruise could have stayed independent and avoided the initial culture clash with GM or any other company, for that matter. But in the end, staying independent was at conflict with the startup's true mission, which is getting these self-driving cars out as quickly as possible.

"When we looked at what GM brought to table, which has decades of automotive experience, assembly plants, lots of capitaltheres no doubt we could accelerate that mission and compress the timeline by partnering with one of the biggest automakers in the world," Vogt said. " We had to sort of suck up our pride and do what was right for the mission here."

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Cruise CEO: Joining GM Hasn't Been Smooth Sailing - Fortune

In BriefA chief strategy officer has stated that retraining is theanswer to the threat that AI represents to jobs and livelihoods.However, several other industry leaders back other solutions tothis major stumbling block in the age of automation. Retraining as Retaining

Jeremy Auger, a Chief Strategy Officer at D2L, an educational technology company, has asserted in a post on entrepreneur.com that the way for humans to maintain their relevance in the labor force in the face of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation developments is through ongoing, career-long retraining. His voice is added to a choir of individuals who are preaching the same message.

Auger argues that AI represents an unprecedented challenge to the work force on account of its cerebral capabilities, which could see it replacing the human workforce in the cognitive space as well as the physical one. He argues that

learning cant end with graduation. To be competitive, companies will need to step up and provide education opportunities themselves, while encouraging self-directed learning so they can ensure that their workers are continually acquiring new skills

Firstly, he argues that we need to change what people learn. Rather than attempt to match AI in ability, we should instead aim to cultivate the skills that AI is unlikely to develop, such as innovation and creativity: seeing connections in seemingly unrelated things. This is the impetus behind other related programs like IBMs P-Tech, which seeks to give children today a more tech-oriented education that befits tomorrows automation-driven world.

He also argues that we should shift the onus of education away from parents and schools, and towards ourselves and the companies we are part of, who should take responsibility for continually providing opportunities for their employees to develop. This is a view shared by David Kenny, IBMs senior Vice President for Watson, who wrote in an article for Wired that we should be

updating the Federal Work-Study program, something long overdue, [which] would give college students meaningful, career-focused internships at companies rather than jobs in the school cafeteria or library

However, retraining and re-educating is not the end-all-be-all answer to the ever-growing issue that is automation.There are rival choirs who are lauding different solutions to AI joining the workforce, which Stephen Hawking states will cause job destruction deep into the middle classes, and Oxford University researchers claim that 47 percent of US jobs are at riskbecause of it.

Bill Gates has proposed taxing robots and corporations in order to provide for people whose jobs are being replaced: he has asserted that Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, youd think that wed tax the robot at a similar level.

Others have proposed a system of universal basic income (UBI) an income prescribed by the government to any citizen to give individuals the money that they would have earned through a job replaced by automation. People would then be able to work to augment their pay, but would always be able to survive regardless of whether they are employed.

Mark Zuckerberg is an advocator of the UBI strategy, viewing it as a platform for innovation rather than the sad consequence of being exceeded by a robot. He told Harvard graduates that We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.

There are a spectrum of views concerning the best response to increasing automation of the working world although none of them seem to guarantee the best situation for AI and humans. However, it is important that we continue to have these conversations now rather than face themafter the problem has progressed much further.

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Expert Asserts that Retraining is the Best Response to AI Automation - Futurism

SHRM

How Automation of Jobs Will Affect Talent Acquisition SHRM BOSTONGood news for recruiters: Companies will continue to need their skills to hire human talent even as more tasks become automated. In fact, the role of talent management professional may even become more important as organizations incorporate ...

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How Automation of Jobs Will Affect Talent Acquisition - SHRM

While the rise of automation may have some adverse impact on the outsourcing of labour to developing nations, it would not preclude economic development entirely (Economic model that Asia has used for decades is now broken; June 28).

An automated factory would produce savings in nations in which the cost of labour is high. China, where manpower has become more expensive in recent years, is no exception.

We must, however, question the assumption that robots will always provide an unbeatable cost advantage over humans. In industrialising economies with low wages, the edge robots have is narrower.

The cost equation becomes even less clear-cut after factoring in the capital expenditure and infrastructure required for full automation, against the low price of shipping through international supply chains.

We should also consider demographic trends and how they relate to consumption patterns. Developed nations are ageing and shrinking, whereas residents of developing countries with growing populations will represent an ever larger slice of worldwide consumers.

In these markets, goods produced in an automated factory overseas might still be priced beyond the reach of the working classes, creating space for more affordable local products to thrive.

Even if export manufacturing were to falter, the size of these domestic markets could be sufficient to support and drive development. This path is slower, but is nonetheless an alternative.

Lastly, the transition to complete automation gives emerging economies a window of opportunity, perhaps a few decades, to progress before the export-centric model becomes obsolete.

That is not to say that developing countries can ignore the ramifications of automation and the potential loss of outsourced industry. Governments must be prepared to adopt alternative and varied strategies on the road from Third World to First.

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Automation not death knell for emerging markets - TODAYonline

Radiologists, who receive years of training and are some of the highest paid doctors, are among the first physicians who will have to adapt as artificial intelligence expands into health care.

Radiologists use medical images, such as X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds and PET scans, to diagnose and treat patients. The field has greatly improved patient care, but has also driven up health care costs.

Precise numbers are hard to come by, but most estimates place radiology as an $8 billion industry in the U.S. Globally, the market is expected to grow from $28 billion to $36 billion by 2021, according to research firm Marketsandmarkets.

The tech and radiology communities expect artificial intelligence to transform medical imaging, providing better services at lower costs. For example, if you're getting an MRI, an AI program can improve the analysis, leading to better treatment.

"This is going to be transformational," said Keith Dreyer, vice chairman of radiology computing and information sciences at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Every month there's going to be a new algorithm that we're going to use and integrate into our solutions. When you look back we'll say, 'How did I ever live without this?'"

Today radiologists face a deluge of data as they serve patients. When Jim Brink, radiologist in chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, entered the field in the late 1980s, radiologists had to examine 20 to 50 images for CT and PET scans. Now, there can be as many as 1,000 images for one scan.

The work can be tedious, making it prone to error. The added imagery also makes it harder for radiologists to use their time efficiently. Brink expects artificial intelligence to act as a diagnostic aid, flagging specific images that a human should spend more time examining.

Related: Why U.S. workers are at a higher risk of automation

Arterys, a medical imaging startup, reads MRIs of the heart and measures blood flow through its ventricles. The process usually takes a human 45 minutes. Arterys can do it in 15 seconds.

The remarkable power of today's computers has raised the question of whether humans should even act as radiologists. Geoffrey Hinton, a legend in the field of artificial intelligence, went so far as to suggest that schools should stop training radiologists.

Those on the front lines are less dramatic.

"There's a misunderstanding that someone can program a bot that will take over everything the radiologist does," said Carla Leibowitz, head of strategy and marketing at Arterys. "Radiologists still use the product and still make judgment calls. [We're] trying to make products to make their lives easier."

According to Dreyer, a radiologist spends about half the day examining images. The rest is spent communicating with patients and other physicians. There's only so much that automated systems can take over.

"Our desire to have somebody in control, I don't think that will go away anytime soon," said General Leung, cofounder of MIMOSA Diagnostics, which is testing a smartphone device that uses AI to aid diabetics. "Someone's always going to want a person to have made the decision."

The future for radiologists may be similar to airline pilots. While planes generally fly on auotpilot, there's still a human in the cockpit.

Related: Goodbye high seas, hello cubicle. Sailor, the next desk job.

Dreyer's hospital is enthusiastically embracing the potential of AI to transform radiology. They've bulked up their computing power and are organizing their data to train algorithms. But there's a long road ahead. Artificial intelligence will need to be able to respond to thousands of situations to match the image interpretation that a radiologist does. Right now, Massachusetts General Hospital is focusing on 25 of them.

"The foreseeable future is not going to be human vs. machine, but human plus machine vs. a human without a machine," Dreyer said. "The human plus machine is going to win."

The future of radiologists appears to offer a lesson for any worker concerned about automation. If you can't beat the machines, join them.

CNNMoney (Washington) First published July 14, 2017: 10:55 AM ET

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What happens when automation comes for highly paid doctors - CNNMoney

Dive Brief:

IBM and Automation Anywhere are combiningAutomation Anywheres Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform with IBMs digital process automation software to create software bots that can help businesses handle repetitive, task-based business processes, according to an IBM announcement.

IBM says the new offering will be especially helpful to companies whose employees regularly complete data-intensive manual tasks within business processes, a common practice in the banking, financial services, insurance and healthcare industries. Examples of such tasks include filing insurance claims, processing bank loans, paying vendors for services and opening customer accounts, according to IBM.

The offering is intended to free employees from repetitive manual tasks and allow them to focus on more creative aspects of their jobs, according to the report.

IBM pointed to The Hanover Insurance Group as an example. Hanover uses Automation Anywhere's RPA platform for back-office functions, such as underwriting, billing and claims.IBM's Business Process Manager comes into play to help manage larger system-wide processes, such as new business quoting, underwriting, and policy administration.

The key for the technology is integration. Though the systems work on their own, when combined customers can streamline business operations and eliminate some rote work for employees.

While some people express concerns about job losses due to automation, others focus on how the gradual displacement in the workforce through automation will aid the economy and drive growth.

Companies like IBM optimistic about the potential benefits of automation, focusing on how its technology will actually improve job satisfaction by freeing people from tasks theyd likely prefer not to do anyway. Employees may even get better at their jobs.A recent report from McKinsey estimates automation could raise productivity growth globally by 0.8% to 1.4% annually.

Top image credit: Pixabay

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IBM, Automation Anywhere want to automate rote, data-intensive tasks - CIO Dive

With the latest advancements in automation and AI, many CISOs are recognizing the potential for automation to transform security operations. Given the way many technology vendors hype their solutions, you could be forgiven for thinking humans should be removed from security flows to the greatest extent possible. But, you would be wrong!

On the contrary, security analysts are not only an important part of the security process, they are THE most important part. So, when you think of automation, you should think of it not as a way of replacing security analysts, but rather as a way of empowering them to do more of what they do best. This is an important distinction.

The fact is, automation is not a panacea. Certainly, the early and rudimentary forms of automation our industry has seen in the past decade have fallen short of their promise. SIEM systems allow you to collect lots of log data, but the growth in data means ever-increasing amounts of backlog to process. Those same systems, with their inflexible, rules-based approach to threat detection, overwhelm analysts with torrents of false positives.

To make things worse, there are still far too many false negatives and intrusions that get by undetected. No matter what an automation vendor tells you, humans are still the absolute best at identifying previously unknown threats. However, we just cant do it at scale.

Solving the cybersecurity crisis cant start with the assumption humans should be automated out of the system - in fact, it should be quite the opposite. In an ideal configuration, human analysts are at the center of everything, supported with advanced automation tools that can make sense of the torrents of data being generated and allowing them to make the types of nuanced decisions that will take a very long time to yield to technology.

Some new generation solutions are purely focused on AI and machine learning. The promise is you turn it on in your environment and after a few days of the system learning on its own, it will be able to detect all the bad stuff. However, these systems suffer from a fatal flaw: missing the business context, adaptability and explainability needed to be truly effective.

What do human analysts know better than any system or, more importantly, any intruder? They know their own environment and the enterprise context, as well as having an intuition about how their system operates and what is normal versus what is questionable. Humans also adapt quickly to fast changing conditions and can always explain why they did something. On the other hand, humans cannot scale and could struggle with mistakes and inconsistencies. Machines, as we know, are exponentially faster and consistent.

The ideal system is still one that unites analyst and machine, augmenting the intelligence of a security analyst with the automation scale of a machine. To achieve this, we need the right kind of automation.

There are different types of automation. As explained by Harvard Business Review, basic robotic process automation handles routine and repeatable tasks, and can only scale some of the motions of an analyst, but cannot scale intelligence. Cognitive automation, on the other hand, can handle decision making around the severity of an alert by evaluating the full context of all data surrounding an event. Cognitive automation by itself, however, is not sufficient. To avoid pitfalls of a blackbox, automation needs to be complemented by analysts input and feedback on a continuous basis.

Recent, new technologies now make it possible to play to analysts strengths far more effectively. The next generation of automation technology allows analysts to feed their tribal knowledge about context and environment easily into the machine learning system, without requiring large training data sets. In addition to drastically increasingly efficacy, this allows a properly designed system to adapt and evolve flexibly as context and environment change. The analyst is in charge and the machine dutifully mimics and executes what the analysts would do, only at extreme scale.

Security automation doesnt mean removing analysts from the equation. Instead, good security automation is about empowering your analysts to force multiply their efforts, aiding them to be more productive and satisfied in their jobs, and freeing them to tackle the most challenging threats. With the right technologies and processes in place, your secops dream team can become a tag team of expert human security analysts plus virtual security analysts powered by cognitive automation.

This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network. Want to Join?

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Why automation isn't everything in cybersecurity | CSO Online - CSO Online

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning continue to make their way into the enterprise, questions remain about which jobs will be most impacted by the technologies. According to a report from automation OS WorkMarket, published Thursday, 74% of business leaders and employees said they believe that some parts of their job could be automated in some way.

In addition to believing that automation could impact their jobs, many respondents felt that it could happen soon. Some 61% of business leaders said that automation could be deployed in their particular industry or job within a single year.

IT problems, data processing, and repetitive tasks like data entry are the most automatable tasks, the report said. IT issues were listed as the biggest hindrance to getting work done, with 43% of leaders and 29% of employees mentioning it as a roadblockmeaning that efforts to automate IT could lead in some deployments.

SEE: The Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Bundle (TechRepublic Academy)

While many of the respondents felt that automation could happen, they weren't all interested in exploring it. Only 29% of employees said that they were interested in automation, while 52% of business leaders said they were.

In the short term, process automation is more valuable than general AI, the report found. Automation technologies were currently being used by 41% of respondents, compared to the 13% using AI. More leaders (56%) have a plan in place for automation than do for AI (44%), the report said,

Overwhelmingly, respondents noted the potential value in automation. Some 90% said that they believe automating work tasks will provide particular advantages such as reducing manual errors, increasing speed, and improving the quality of the work. More than half of employees said they believe automation could save them up to two hours a day, and 78% of leaders said they could save up to three hours a day with automation, the report found.

"A key to success with tomorrow's mix of traditional employees, digital substitutes and crowd-based work systems is ensuring that the needs of both shareholders and the labor force are met," New York University professor Arun Sundararajan said in a press release for the report. "Productivity gains through automation and on-demand innovation are essential to maintaining economic growth levels that create sufficient future demand for human talent."

Image: iStockphoto/NicoElNino

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74% of professionals believe their jobs could be automated, report ... - TechRepublic

A new partnership between IBM and Automation Anywhere, announced via press release on Thursday, will offer integrations of the two companies' technologies to more effectively automate data-intensive business processes.

Automation Anywhere uses its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform to create specific software bots that handle repetitive work tasks. That platform will be integrated with automation software from IBM, such as the IBM Business Process Manager and Operational Decision Manager, to provide a more broad approach to automation, the release said.

Essentially, businesses that are managing certain business processes through IBM software will be able to create bots to streamline those processes with Automation Anywhere's RPA platform, the release said. The joint effort will be available to business systems running on-premises or in the cloud.

SEE: Research: Automation and the future of IT jobs (Tech Pro Research)

By automating and improving business processes, the pair aims to "free employees to focus their time on more creative and customer-facing aspects of their jobs," the release said. This fits the trend of other companies looking to AI to complement employee work, not necessarily replace it.

Industries like banking, financial services, and insurance, which typically require manual tasks for many processes, stand to benefit from the partnership, the release said. This is especially true when the processes are data-intensive as well.

"The ability to smartly process and manage data is fast-becoming a competitive advantage," Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Hybrid Cloud solutions, said in the release. "The combination of the Automation Anywhere and IBM process management platforms provides a powerful new way for companies to streamline business processes so employees can spend less time filling out forms and more time working with customers."

For example, a bank employee could use a bot to make it easier to process new loans or open new accounts, the press release noted. The bot could find and capture the necessary data from other documents and bring it into the required forms.

Insurance provider The Hanover Insurance Group uses bots available through the partnership to more efficiently handle some of its back-office processes. In addition to speeding their completion of the tasks, Ian Maher, vice president of strategic sourcing at The Hanover Group, said in the release that it "could be a starting point for adding more advanced cognitive capabilities into our business processes."

Image: iStockphoto/monsitj

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IBM, Automation Anywhere partner on software bot solution to replace manual tasks - TechRepublic

Global professional services company Accenture is sharpening its focus on learning and reskilling in India in the areas of "new IT" which is digital, analytics, cloud, mobility and security at a time when 50 per cent of its global revenue is coming from digital. "We caught the digital trend very early on, and started going down our digital journey and focusing on the 'new'," Rekha Menon, managing director of Accenture India , told ET in an interview.

Edited excerpts:

What is the purpose behind a renewed learning focus and investments?

The massive industry disruption led by digital meant that we needed to rotate ourselves to the new (which is digital, analytics, cloud, mobility and security). Today, 50 per cent of our global revenues come from digital. As a people business, rotating ourselves internally to the new means we must train our people. We spend nearly $1 billion on training globally.

In India, there are investments in infrastructure, such as our new learning centre in Bengaluru, which has a different design principle based on how people learn. There is learning on the gomore than 38,000 learning boards globally that can be accessed on any device, which is like having a big MOOC internally. We also have collaborative learning boards, so people can learn together, and we have gamified learning.

What is the learning focus at the leadership level in the context of the new IT? The focus is on future trends and what this means for our business, what kind of offerings will we take to our clients and what will we do internally. It is less technical, it is less subject specific deep knowledge. Leadership behaviour also needs to change since the workforce is very different. Even if I am working on weekends, I should be okay to not expect responses back. In the old world, that would not be the case. Because leadership mostly has grown up in a different environment, we must learn to work differently.

Do you think the middle management in companies is still under threat despite reskilling and some bit of redundancy is unavoidable due to automation? Automation takes away certain repetitive roles, but at the same time it creates new opportunity, so there are two sides to every change. Look at Uber. Yes, there was a lot of noise about it disrupting the entire vehicle industry, which it did, but look at the number of entrepreneurs it created, the number of jobs it created. It is a part of the cycle.

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Automation takes away certain roles, but also creates new opportunity: Rekha Menon, MD, Accenture India - Economic Times