The second industrial revolution generated many new jobs as firms began to mass produce. During the third industrial revolution, labour intensive processes became automated and moved the labour market from manual labour towards administrative/office positions, through electronics and IT (Schwab, 2016). During the third wave, techniques to collect tremendous amounts of data were developed and today data has been said to be the world’s most valuable resource. From this, complex Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems emerged, from which businesses can analyse collected data and make more informed decisions to optimized their business processes. Now, we stand before the fourth industrial revolution which involves the use of automated robots to analyse the data and develop improved business processes from such input. This leaves the question; what input will humans have in the future for designing improved business processes and will the large ERP and analytics firms as Oracle, SAP and Salesforce survive?
There are four driving elements in the fourth industrial revolution: Process Mining, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain Technologies (van der Aalst, 2018). Theoretically, these four elements combined have the capability to connect a firm’s or industry’s entire value-chain, both vertically and horizontally, and from this make automated process enhancing decisions. However, robots are only as good as the algorithms they are built on and without constant human cognitive interactions to innovate and improve those algorithms, how can they create better solutions designed to serve human needs? Saunderson and Nejat (2019) explores how robots will be able to interpret non-verbal communications in social interactions, given that a substantial part of meaning is hidden behind conscious and unconscious bodily functions which are not explicitly stated or even understood. I think this limitation is the main barrier for Industry 4.0 to completely eliminate human day-to-day business application developers. Team meetings will be needed and interpreted on a conscious level, not yet graspable by robots. Given the many drawbacks of human individuals, such as the principal agent problem generating conflicting organizational interests, AIs may today objectively have the capacity to improve overall market efficiencies. However, until robots can assimilate such a consciousness; ERP and analytics firms will still be useful in the long term to build the groundwork for the models used to develop AI algorithms and interpret the data available.
References:
Saunderson, S. and Nejat, G., 2019. How Robots Influence Humans: A Survey of Nonverbal Communication in Social Human–Robot Interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics, 11(4), pp.575-608.
Schwab, 2016. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/#:~:text=The%20First%20Industrial%20Revolution%20used,information%20technology%20to%20automate%20production.
van der Aalst, W., Becker, J., Bichler, M., Buhl, H., Dibbern, J., Frank, U., Hasenkamp, U., Heinzl, A., Hinz, O., Hui, K., Jarke, M., Karagiannis, D., Kliewer, N., König, W., Mendling, J., Mertens, P., Rossi, M., Voss, S., Weinhardt, C., Winter, R. and Zdravkovic, J., 2018. https://eur-on-worldcat-org.eur.idm.oclc.org/oclc/7925381332
