I work in automation. I know a lot about it. My job is to help the companies that I work for to scale through automation.
Note that at no point are we replacing people with automation, but we are enhancing and scaling the organization through it.
There are three basic stages:
- Personal Automation
- Partial Automation
- Full Automation
Personal automation is like having a basic coffee pot. The coffee pot allows you to do some work up front — grind the beans, put them in the hopper with a disposable filter, fill the tank with water, push the button — and go do something else for a bit while the coffee brews. Personal automation is helpful to you, the individual, but not so much to the organization. It doesn’t move the needle.
Partial automation starts to gain benefits for the organization. Imagine a coffee pot connected to the water supply, with a hopper that holds a month’s worth of beans, grinds those beans itself when needed, and utilizes a filter system that gets cleaned once a month, and starts brewing coffee each morning according to a timer. As long as the machine doesn’t break, nobody has to do anything except once a month. That’s helpful to both the people and the organization.
Full automation is the holy grail. This is where automation can scale your organization. Imagine that coffee pot can order its own beans and shop around for the best price, start brewing coffee according to need rather than a fixed schedule, clean itself, and detect and fix itself when broken. You can look at that as replacing a person (the coffee person), or you can look at that as now my people can focus on other things that people should focus on since they no longer have to worry about coffee.
Today, for software developers, AI is at the personal automation stage. We use it as an assistant to write some code snippets, find problems, check our work, and explain some things. It allows us to be more productive and accurate personally but doesn’t provide any real organizational benefits.
But we’re on our way to partial automation.
