Category Archives: Automation

Blue Prism, which provides robotic process automation software, outlined a new alliance program that should give the company more distribution into the enterprise.

How to Automate the Enterprise

One of today's biggest opportunities for IT to make an impact is by automating business processes, manufacturing, repetitive tasks, and more. We delve into examples and best practices.

The company's technology alliance program, includes Appian, Captricity, Celaton, Expert System, IBM, and Minit. Of that group, IBM is clearly the largest.

For Blue Prism, the partnerships will enable it to automate more processes. Blue Prism specializes in creating a digital workforce for industries ranging from financial services to healthcare and insurance.

The goal for Blue Prism is to leverage its robotic process automation system as an operating system to automate work. Blue Prism sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing.

Also: We must make the 'right choices' when designing algorithms: Tim O'Reilly | Robotic process automation: the latest promise to liberate back offices | How to supercharge robotic process automation | How to automate the enterprise: Your guide to getting started | How robots are filling worker shortages, replacing 'bad' jobs, and making work more rewarding |

With a bevy of partners in the fold, Blue Prism and its Operating System for the Digital Workforce will be in more digital transformation deployments. Companies are automating work with software that can analyze text, interpret unstructured data, and apply machine learning.

In recent weeks, Blue Prism has been building out its partner base with announcements with EY, Appian, and an ecosystem certification program.

Blue Prism is still a small company with revenue of 9.6 million for 2016, up 59 percent from a year ago. Blue Prism ended 2016 with 153 customers and plans to ramp that total with an indirect sales model.

Blue Prism CEO Alastair Bathgate on robotics process automation, the digital workforce:

Link:

Blue Prism lands more partners, including IBM, for robotics process automation - ZDNet

JPMorgan Chase is putting a priority on using technology to automate manual processes and save time, according to its investor letters published today.

In a letter by Matt Zames, the banks chief operating officer, JPMorgan Chase detailed some of its strategy in this area. Zames said the bank made automating development life cycles a priority in 2016. For instance, by using automated code scanning, the bank saved nearly 120,000 developer hours during the year. He added that the bank expects to be able to deliver more than 90% of its software through end-to-end automation over the next five years. In other words, much of the software code testing done by humans can be replicated by technology, making the process much quicker.

Zames, along with business leaders of JPMorgans various business lines, published their individual letters to shareholders on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after CEO Jamie Dimon issued his annual letter.

Like others, the firm is also looking to robotics and machine learning to automate basic tasks. The bank is looking to robotic process automation to handle 1.7 million administrative requests in 2017, Zames said.

Machine learning offers another exciting opportunity to drive new capabilities for the firm and our customers and clients, Zames wrote. As an example, we recently introduced COiN, a contract intelligence platform that uses unsupervised machine learning to analyze legal documents and to extract important data points and clauses.

In an initial implementation, the company extracted 150 relevant attributes from 12,000 annual commercial credit agreements in seconds. Zames said it would have taken as many as 360,000 hours a year to perform such a task manually.

This capability has far-reaching implications considering that approximately 80% of loan servicing errors today are due to contract interpretation errors, Zames wrote.

In general, cost savings were a common theme of several of the letters from the various leaders of JPMs business lines.

Zames noted that the bank has introduced innovative [data] storage offerings, decreasing the price of our lowest tier storage by 75%. We are driving additional efficiency by reducing waste and becoming smarter around technology consumption.

Gordon Smith, the CEO of consumer and community banking, said JPMorgan Chase remains fiercely devoted to expense discipline. He noted the firm has overseen $2.4 billion in structural expense reductions since 2014 and improved overhead ratio from 58% in 2014 to 55% in 2016.

Importantly, during that same time period, we continued to prudently invest in our core businesses to deliver value for the long term, Smith added. In particular, weve invested heavily in technology and marketing associated with new product launches, digital and payments innovation, and cybersecurity. Our investments have also improved our control environment, leading to more automated processes, better customer and employee experiences.

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JPM's Zames touts automation, robotics in shareholder letter - American Banker

Brocade networking solutions help the worlds leading organizations turn their networks into platforms for business innovation as they transition to todays era of digital business.

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The digital economy has IT up against the wall. Lines of business are focused on boosting innovation and enhancing the customer experience through digital transformation initiatives, but network complexity can be a significant obstacle for IT. According to one study, 75% of CIOs admit that the network is impacting their organizations ability to achieve business goals, with an estimated 35% of all network downtime attributed to human error.

This problem has understandably led IT to embrace automation in each technology domain, including the network, as a means of accelerating service delivery. But automating service delivery within each domain alone isn't enough. There must be seamless automation across the entire data center, or the ability to perform consistently and efficiently will suffer serious setbacks. Its this growing need for agility and operational efficiency that ultimately validates the business case for introducing open, cross-domain automation capabilities.

Simply automating and orchestrating a single domain within the IT services delivery chain fails to address the desired agility and efficiency goals. After all, even when operating with automated, functional silos (including network, compute, storage, and applications), the execution of tasks spanning multiple domains is unacceptably time-intensive. The innovation velocity and efficiency associated with cross-domain automation is what ultimately enables digital transformation.

Consider a business unit that is launching an ad campaign for a new product and expecting a massive influx of online orders. The ability of the website to meet this demand is critical to the success of the campaign, the product launch, and the business itself. However, at the peak of the campaign, a critical network link to the companys main database server goes downcutting off the ability to deliver dynamic web content and process orders.

While this would be catastrophic for most organizations, its not for an organization equipped with open, cross-domain automation:

The total time to recovery is approximately one to two minutes.

However, in an organization that lacks open, cross-domain automation the same scenario is riddled with latency and delays. Heres the same workflow as before, only executed using a manual workflow common to most organizations:

The total time to recovery in this scenario is approximately 25 to 55 minutes.

Although both scenarios involve cross-domain technologies and platforms, in the first scenario critical website services are down for less than two minutes. In contrast, manually re-establishing the same critical services could take nearly an hour. In a time-sensitive campaign like this, each minute of downtime represents significant potential revenue loss. Even worse is the incalculable negative impact to the reputation of the business.

Open, cross-domain automation works by combining workflow actions with sensors installed as inbound integration points designed to watch for specific events from cross-domain technologies and platforms. With this configuration events will trigger the corresponding workflow based upon predefined rules and If This, Then That (IFTTT) logic.

Actions are outbound integration points that execute commands on external systems such as the network device or ticketing system in the previous scenarios. When executed via workflows, cross-domain execution is nearly instantaneous with support staff being made aware and required to act only if the workflow automation is unable to rectify the problem.

With this unique, open, and customizable approach, workflows can respond to events and execute actions in a programmatic way on any network device, cross-domain platform, or application. As a result, IT organizations can respond to requests faster and operate more efficiently to help the business thrive.

For more guidance on modern automation strategies, visit our Network World blog page.

To learn more about Brocades advanced automation solutions, visit us here.

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Why Cross-Domain Capabilities Matter for Automation: Two Business Scenarios - Network World

The New York Times:

Who is winning the race for jobs between robots and humans? Last year, two leading economists described a future in which humans come out ahead. But now theyve declared a different winner: the robots.

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots.

The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs. In a paper last year, they said it was likely that increased automation would create new, better jobs, so employment and wages would eventually return to their previous levels. Just as cranes replaced dockworkers but created related jobs for engineers and financiers, the theory goes, new technology has created new jobs for software developers and data analysts.

The first half of that last sentence points to one small problem:How many of those dockworkers became financiers and engineers?

The two researchers have now, the Times reports, turned their attention to real-world data and:

The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward especially blue-collar men without college degrees.

The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and its going to take a very long time for these communities to recover, Mr. Acemoglu said.

A very long time.

As a reminder, real wages in Britain stagnated for most of the first half of the 19th Century even as GDP, boosted by new technology, grew rapidly, a pause (dubbed the Engels Pause by the British economist Robert Allen) that was to have very real political consequences. Who was that Engels fellow again?

The Guardian:

As of 2015, a typical production worker in the US earned about 9% less than a comparable worker in 1973. Over the same 42 years, the American economy grew by more than 200%, or a staggering $11tn.

Now think about the implications of self-driving trucks.

And then take a look at the chart here that shows themost common job in each state.

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Automation: The Beat Goes On | National Review - National Review

Fear of Automation's Dark Side Leads to Calls for Action Wall Street Journal (subscription) But he also expects that leaps forward in related automation technology will put many people out of work, and he's one of several Silicon Valley investors who think it's unfair to expect society to adapt without offering help to people who are at risk ...

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Fear of Automation's Dark Side Leads to Calls for Action - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Rob LoCascio is the founder and CEO of LivePerson.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has a surprisingly naive take on the issue ofAI and robots replacing human jobs.

Mnuchin said that human obsolescence is not even on our radar screen 50-100 more years away and that hes not worried at all. For those of us in the tech industry, its clear his timescale is inaccurate and that, if thegovernment is complacent about AI, the country is setting itself up for an economic shock.

Theres been downward pressure on jobs since the Industrial Revolution due to leaps in productivity brought about by human ingenuity and lucky discoveries. This has accelerated since the 1980s with the mass adoption of computers, but the market has more or less kept up, creating new openings to fill the eradicated ones, albeit not in the same places (coastal cities have gained, Rust Belt areas have lost out).

However, we have a tsunami on the horizon: automation using AI. It will place intense downward pressure on employment, and threatens to catch a generation (really, three generations) off guard, with unemployment levels higher than the Great Depression.

Automation is going to leave millions of Americans un- or under-employed not in 50-100 more years, but within the next decade. As someone very familiar with one of the most-affected sectors, the customer service industry I invented web chat technology for customer service in the late 1990s, and have been in the space for more than 20 years I can already see the change happening, and the robots appearing, today.

From our data on large banks, telcos, retailers and so on, we can see that approximately 40-50 percent of tasks performed in customer care fall into a category that is highly susceptible to automation: routine processes like updating payment cards, addresses, passwords and other basic processes. More than 3 million people in the U.S. alone are employed in call centers, and its clear to me that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will displace a substantial number of U.S. workers in a far shorter time period than what Mnuchin is positing.

We need a new New Deal to tackle the consequences of automation. It should be big, aggressive and, unlike the first one under FDR, it should be preemptive. Without some kind of counterbalancing action, well see tens of millions of workers stranded, with curtailed employment prospects. This will kick off a hereditary shockwave of economic hardship that could be felt for generations.

We know the jobs that will be affected first, in addition to the 3+ million customer care agents I mentioned above, and they are very common ones that employ large swathes of the population: truck and taxi drivers, cashiers, security guards, retail clerks and a number of others. These people, who will suffer the most, are also the least aware of new advancements in AI and automation (in fact, they are the least likely to be tech savvy at all). Not only this, but they are highly likely to be in lower income brackets without the luxury of time to re-train while holding down their current job(s), and without the savings to invest in re-education.

More alarming still, our own research shows that 88 percent of Americans reported not being worried about losing their jobs even after being shown research from Oxford University predicting that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to automation. So we have potentially millions of unemployed Americans on our hands in the next two decades, with very few of them currently doing anything to prepare for a new occupation.

3D render of a robot trying to solve a wooden cube puzzle

A number of people in tech have begun to offer solutions to the looming automation tsunami. Bill Gates suggested we tax the robots in order to slow the progress of automation and re-direct money toward human-service jobs that require a level of empathy and compassion that artificial intelligence cannot yet offer. Massachusetts also floated an idea of taxing self-driving cars.

The problem with taxation is that it is a deterrent to deploying the technology and reaping the productivity gains, while only indirectly helping those who are sidelined by it. It could also be a nightmare to measure, and actually collect that tax.

Others, like Elon Musk, have suggested that a universal basic income is our best way forward to ensure even those who are left with no options for employment are still able to reasonably take care of themselves. Y Combinator also ran a basic income experiment in Oakland.

Im skeptical of this approach too, although its certainly true that social safety nets will need to be strengthened in the face of the shift to automation. UBI reduces the incentive to work, and risks stranding millions of people in a subsistence living trap, able to just about get by, but cut off from the opportunity for upward mobility, as this essay details well.

The first step should be to build up flood defenses against the tsunami. We already know which industries are most vulnerable. Focusing on those, the new New Deal should fund education and retraining programs that provide an opportunity for at-risk employees to learn new skills, geared toward those industries that will be around longer-term. The government could partner with major employers to advertise these training and education programs, and make sure staff are aware of them, as the number of open positions at those employers declines due to automation.

While initiatives like this almost always tend to over- or under-shoot, it will at least soften the pain of impact. Think of it as a stimulus program that incentivizes those individuals in need of job retraining and those organizations that proactively create new jobs. Past programs like Roosevelts New Deal and 2009s ARRA mitigated the worst of the impact of economic turbulence.

My second suggestion is an area where technologists can help. Create software platforms that rely upon human input and labor in areas where AI is less applicable: things like creativity, empathy and other uniquely human capabilities. Government could help with this. For example, it could offer co-investment to startups or companies that create platforms that use human labor to do uniquely human activities. (Usually, government investment in tech goes poorly, and inflates bubbles, but in this case, a pre-bubble that anticipates the great automation shift would actually soften the landing.)

We have seen that mass-production in industry has led to a re-evaluation of pre-industrial techniques artisanal goods, la Etsy, grew in prominence and value as people start to cherish the idiosyncratic and the hand-made. The same goes for agriculture, where organic farming and even home farming (in Brooklyn!) made a comeback as an alternative to mass-scale industrial farming. In both cases, tech platforms have helped make those older forms of production economically realistic by reducing distribution and access costs, even though the base cost of goods was higher.

I believe we will need platforms that take advantage of the glut of human labor that the great automation shift will create, and, specifically, we will need platforms that focus on tasks where AI has trouble, and where humans have the upper hand, such as design, creativity, empathy and judgment. Instead of sticking its head in the sand and pretending everything is fine, the government and Steven Mnuchin should focus in more detail on the disruption thats about to happen, and build a plan to address it.

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We need a New Deal to address the economic risks of automation - TechCrunch

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While the American public remains cautious about embracing the idea of self-driving vehicles, many popular vehicle features are forms of automation and that will only increase, speakers on a panel at an annual transportation conference said Friday morning.

Vehicle automation will be the greatest transformation since the invention of the automobile itself, said Jim Barbaresso, a senior vice president at HNTB who is that companys practice leader for intelligent transportation systems, said during the Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments Transportation Summit at The Premier banquet center in South Toledo.

An Uber car in driverless mode waits in traffic during a test drive in San Francisco. Uber said it is resuming its self-driving car program in Arizona and Pittsburgh after it was suspended following a crash last weekend. The company had also grounded self-driving cars in San Francisco over the weekend, but they resumed operating earlier Monday.

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This is going to change all of our lives in ways we dont fully understand yet, Mr. Barbaresso said.

But automation, he said, also has the potential to save countless lives by preventing crashes and to eliminate wasted time and fuel and ecological damage caused by traffic congestion.

Surveys, including one released early this week by the American Automobile Association, show many American drivers believe vehicle automation will increase traffic crash rates and that a majority are fearful about the security of data exchanges necessary for operation of fully automated vehicles.

Such vehicles security, and the publics trust in it, will be key to public acceptance of this technology, Mr. Barbaresso said.

But using sensor arrays and computers already available, he said, automated vehicles are able to check their status 10 times per second through communication with other vehicles and roadside systems, he said.

Among challenges, he said, are data management, security, and privacy, as well as funding for the public side of supporting infrastructure.

The Ohio Turnpikes chief engineer, meanwhile, said the publics perception about automations safety is counter to analysis showing 94 percent of all traffic crashes are caused by human error.

Citing the example from last summer of a tractor-trailer driver who struck a line of 10 cars on the turnpike near Bellevue, Ohio, after failing to observe slow traffic ahead, Tony Yacobucci said automation could have prevented that crash and the resulting death of a New York state girl.

Im extremely confident that a truck equipped with sensors run by sophisticated equipment would have stopped in time, Mr. Yacobucci said.

That one moment of inattention results in many preventable accidents, said Cindy Antrican, an AAA spokesman who attended the conference.

But pitching automation to a skeptical public is going to require some work, even if drivers already enjoy such automated features as cruise control, lane guidance, parking assistance, and crash-avoidance braking, she said.

Among Ohio respondents to the auto clubs survey, 47 percent said they couldnt imagine routinely riding in a self-driving vehicle sooner than 10 years from now, if ever, while 38 percent said such technology would result in more crashes, not fewer. And 84 percent said local and state governments should notify the public when and where autonomous-vehicle testing will occur.

Such testing already is occurring, including a test last fall of a self-driving tractor-trailer on the Ohio Turnpike.

Along with its safety benefit, automation could allow vehicles to run closer together, in narrower lanes, while giving elderly and disabled people mobility options they now lack, Mr. Yacobucci said.

The turnpike is establishing itself as a test location for vehicle automation thanks to its fiber-optic communications system and series of service plazas and truck parking at selected interchanges. Mr. Yacobucci predicted that within a decade, it will reserve one lane for automated vehicles.

Embrace change, he said. Its coming fast, and we must be ready to adapt.

Matt Smith, the Michigan Department of Transportations statewide manager for intelligent transportation systems, said his department is working not on vehicle systems, but rather systems along the roadways with which vehicles interact.

Among nascent applications he described is the ability for traffic lights, work-zone warning devices, and roadside weather sensors to communicate with cars.

A vehicle approaching a red light without slowing down, Mr. Smith said, could be signaled to sound an alarm to alert its driver or even apply its brakes automatically. The main challenge with work zones, he said, is up-to-date information about traffic patterns and congestion.

Vehicles computers, meanwhile, could be programmed to collect road-condition data, including the locations of cracks, bumps, and potholes, thus saving highway agencies millions of dollars now spent on inspections.

A former automobile assembly plant at Willow Run, just outside Ypsilanti, Mich., has been transformed into the 335-acre American Center for Mobility, one of 10 proving grounds nationwide for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, Mr. Smith said.

This is truly a transformational time for both safety and mobility, he said.

Contact David Patch at:dpatch@theblade.comor 419-724-6094.

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Toledo experts: Automation the future of vehicles - Toledo Blade

In 1900, 30 million people in the United States were farmers. By 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a matter of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs, mostly due to automation. Yet somehow, the 20thcentury was still seen as an era of unprecedented prosperity.

In the decades to come, we are likely to see similar shifts. Today, just like then, many peoples jobs will be taken over by machines and many of the jobs of the future havent been invented yet. That inspires fear in some, excitement in others, but everybody will need to plan for a future that we can barely comprehend today.

This creates a dilemma for leaders. Clearly, any enterprise that doesnt embrace automation wont be able to survive any better than a farmer with a horse-drawn plow. At the same time, managers need to continue to motivate employees who fear their jobs being replaced by robots. In this new era of automation, leaders will need to identify new sources of value creation.

Its fun to make lists of things we thought machines could never do. It was said that that only humans could recognize faces, play chess, drive a car, and do many other things that are automated today. Yet while machines have taken over tasks, they havent actually replaced humans. Although the workforce has doubled since 1970, unemployment remains fairly low, especially among those that have more than a high school level of education. In fact, overall labor force participation for working age adults has risen from around 70% in 1970 to over 80% today.

How it will impact business, industry, and society.

Once a task becomes automated, it also becomes largely commoditized. Value is then created on a higher level than when people were busy doing more basic things. The value of bank branches, for example, is no longer to manually process deposits, but to solve more complex customer problems like providing mortgages. In much the same way, nobody calls a travel agency to book a simple flight anymore. They expect something more, like designing a dream vacation. Administrative assistants arent valuable because they take dictation and type it up on a typewriter, but because they serve as gatekeepers who prioritize tasks in an era of information overload.

So the first challenge for business leaders facing a new age of automation is not try to simply to cut costs, but to identify the next big area of value creation. How can we use technology to extend the skills of humans in ways that arent immediately clear, but will seem obvious a decade from now? Whoever identifies those areas of value first will have a leg up on the competition.

Amazon may be the most successfully automated company in the world. Everything from its supply chain to its customer relationship management are optimized through its use of big data and artificial intelligence. Its dominance online has become so complete that during the most recent Christmas season it achieved a whopping 36.9% market share in online sales.

So a lot of people were surprised when it launched a brick and mortar book store, but as Apple has shown with its highly successful retail operation, theres a big advantage to having stores staffed with well trained people. They can answer questions, give advice, and interact with customers in ways that a machine never could.

Notice as well that the Apple and Amazon stores are not your typical mom-and-pop shops, but are largely automated themselves, with industrial age conventions like cash registers and shopping aisles disappearing altogether. That allows the sales associates to focus on serving customers rather than wasting time and energy managing transactions.

When Xerox executives first got a glimpse of the Alto, the early personal computer that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh, they werent impressed. To them, it looked more like a machine that automated secretarial work than something that would be valuable to executives. Today, of course, few professionals could function without word processing or spreadsheets.

Were already seeing a similar process of redesign with artificially intelligent technologies. Scott Eckert, CEO of Rethink Robotics, which makes the popular Baxter and Sawyer robots told me, We have seen in many cases that not only does throughput improve significantly, but jobs are redesigned in a way that makes them more interesting and rewarding for the employee. Factory jobs are shifting from manual tasks to designing the work of robots.

Lynda Chin, who co-developed the Oncology Expert Advisor at MD Anderson powered by IBMs Watson, believes that automating cognitive tasks in medicine can help physicians focus more on patients. Instead of spending 12 minutes searching for information and three with the patient, imagine the doctor getting prepared in three minutes and spending 12 with the patient, she says.

This will change how doctors will interact with patients. she continues. When doctors have the worlds medical knowledge at their fingertips, they can devote more of their mental energy to understanding the patient as a person, not just a medical diagnosis. This will help them take lifestyle, family situation and other factors into account when prescribing care.

Before the industrial revolution, most people earned their living through physical labor. Much like today, many tradesman saw mechanization as a threat and indeed it was. Theres not much work for blacksmiths or loom weavers these days. What wasnt clear at the time was that industrialization would create a knowledge economy and demand for higher paid cognitive work.

Today were seeing a similar shift from cognitive skills to social skills. When we all carry supercomputers in our pocket that can access the collective knowledge of the world in an instant, skills like being able to retain information or manipulate numbers are in less demand, while the ability to collaborate, with humans and machines, are rising to the fore.

There are, quite clearly, some things machines will never do. They will never strike out in Little League, get their heart broken, or worry about how their kids are doing in school. These limitations mean that they will never be able to share human experiences or show genuine empathy. We will always need humans to collaborate with other humans.

As the futurist Dr. James Canton put it to me, It is largely a matter of coevolution. With automation driving down value in some activities and increasing the value of others, we redesign our work processes so that people are focused on the areas where they can deliver the most value by partnering with machines to become more productive.

So the key to winning in the era of automation, where robots do jobs formerly performed by humans, is not simply more efficiency, but to explore and identify how greater efficiency creates demand for new jobs to be done.

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How to Win with Automation (Hint: It's Not Chasing Efficiency) - Harvard Business Review

New York Times

Coal Mining Jobs Trump Would Bring Back No Longer Exist New York Times However way you spin it, gas and renewables are going to continue to replace coal, said Nicolas Maennling, senior economics and policy researcher at Columbia University and an author of the automation study. And in order to stay competitive, coal ... and more »

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Coal Mining Jobs Trump Would Bring Back No Longer Exist - New York Times

In Brief Advancements in the field of robotics and AI are prompting the head of Yum Brands to weigh in on the reality of job displacement. According to him, it's going to happen sooner than some may think. Fast Food Automation

How will technological innovation shape the future of the workforce? According to Greg Creed, the CEO of Yum Brands, the parentcompany of popular fast food chains like Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell, automation could replace humans in the food industry by the mid-2020s.

Creed shared this prediction in an interview with CNBC:

I believe, having listened to people in the artificial intelligence area and were starting to work with them in that area I think [50 to 100 years] is way too long. I think its going to happen I dont think it is going to happen next year or the year after, but I do believe that probably by the mid 20s to the late 20s, youll start to see a dramatic change in sort of how machines sort of run the world.

But thats not to say that humans will be completely obsolete. We dont make a lot of things until customers order, explained Creed. Im not sure were going to have robots replace people. That said, he notes that the rise in automation today marks the beginning of robotics [] but I dont see it wholesaling the wholesale sense changing peoples jobs in the short-term.

In contrast, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says that automationisnt an imminent threat to American jobs. He notes that hes not worried at all about machines displacing human workers and that artificial intelligence (AI) taking over jobs wont happen for another 50 to 100 years.

Right now, several blue-collar industries are already feeling the effects of automation. For instance, theRio Tinto mining company has already deployed a fleet of 73 self-driving trucks that haul payloads at a cost 15 percent less than those operated by human drivers. In developing nations in Southeast Asia, where 137 million people depend on manufacturing jobs as their main source of income, a study notes that many workersare in danger of being replaced by automated systems in the next 20 years.

While its impact on white-collar jobsisnt currently quite as pronounced, experts believe that automation will have significant implications within several of those industriesas well. A report from Deloitte Insight states that an estimated 114,000 jobs in the legal sector have a high chance of being replaced with automated machines and algorithms within the next two decades.

These predictions are premised on the fact that machines are now more than capable of completing the repetitive jobs that manyhuman workers are handling today. Given the advancements in the field and the focus people are putting on further developing the technology, its only a matter of time before we truly begin to feel the real effects of automation across multiple industries.

I think its gonna happen, Creed said. Well see a dramatic change in how machines run things.

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CEO Disagrees With Trump Official's Automation Prediction: It's Gonna Happen - Futurism