>> Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.
When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!"
Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things. Automation just reduces the friction to getting things done. Instead of doing 4 hours of mindless data input or moving folders from one place to the other, automation gives you back those four hours so your team can do something sufficiently more important and focus on the bigger picture stuff.
Some teams loved the idea. Other leaders were skeptical and never adopted it. I spent the majority of those three years trying to selling them on this idea automation was good and very little time actually coding. Its interesting seeing the paradigm shift and seeing this stuff everywhere now.
> Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things.
As a non-politically savy person ;-) I have a feeling that this is a similarly dangerous message, since what prevents many teams to focus on really important things is often far too long meetings with managers and similar "important" stakeholders.
The reason you don't lead with headcount reduction is two-fold.
1. Almost every business has growing workload. That means reassigning good employees and not hiring new headcount, not firing existing headcount. Unipurpose, low-value offshore teams are the only ones who get cut (e.g. doing "{this} for every one of {these}" work).
2. Most operational automation is impossible to build well without deep process expertise from the SME currently performing it. If you fire that person immediately after automating their task, what do you think the next SME tells you, when you need their help?
Successfully scaling operational automation programs therefore rely on additional headcount avoidance (aka improving their volume:employee ratio) and value measurement (FTE-equivalent time savings) to justify/measure.
When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!"
Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things. Automation just reduces the friction to getting things done. Instead of doing 4 hours of mindless data input or moving folders from one place to the other, automation gives you back those four hours so your team can do something sufficiently more important and focus on the bigger picture stuff.
Some teams loved the idea. Other leaders were skeptical and never adopted it. I spent the majority of those three years trying to selling them on this idea automation was good and very little time actually coding. Its interesting seeing the paradigm shift and seeing this stuff everywhere now.