Software

Why you aren’t going to lose your job to AI

Artifical intelligence (A.I.) isn't likely to take your job any time soon, in fact it's going to make your work a lot more rewarding, according to the CEO of a company that automates basic tasks using a digital workforce.

Alastair Bathgate is the CEO of Blue Prism, a U.K. tech company that develops robotic process automation (RPA) software to perform clerical and administration tasks for businesses.

For instance, Telefónica's O2 business uses around 160 of Blue Prism's "software robots" to automate 15 core business processes including credit checks and order processing. The robots perform the equivalent workload of nearly 100 full time employees, according to Blue Prism.


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While the software could be used to cut costs, Bathgate believes his customers haven't done this.

"What we found is that people don't use [the software] for cost-cutting, they use it for adding business value," he explained to CNBC in a phone interview.

"So where work is displaced, the humans who were doing that work before tend to get reallocated to new, more important stuff and more suitable to their skills."

This could prove to be an improvement for those employees who are currently stuck completing basic administrative tasks, Bathgate argued.

"It's kind of demeaning to humans to give them this kind of rote-based, simplified, mundane, chore-type work and once you've freed them of that now they are available to do much more interesting things, like speaking to customers.

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Nonetheless, this hasn't stopped the headlines that A.I is here to take away people's jobs.

"I think it's alarmist and unnecessary and untrue," he said. "Even if you look at the previous industrial revolutions that have taken place, they have all resulted in more jobs, not less."

Others have agreed with this view.

"A quick look at history shows us that new technologies often end up creating jobs as well as destroying them," said Professor Andre Spicer, from Cass Business School, in a press release.

"If history is anything to go by, A.I. may not do people out of job - it could actually create more tasks for already strained office workers to do," he added.

Since debuting on the FTSE AIM index earlier this month, the company's share price has risen by 53.2 percent.

"Strategically, we wanted to stake our claim on this new RPA market as a kind of leader in that space," explained Bathgate. "We wanted to make ourselves more credible dealing with some of the large partners and customers. They prefer doing business with a public company."

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Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct rise in the share price since the company's debut on the FTSE AIM index.