IT Business Edge, USA: Global Managing Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Activities That Humans do Well are Even More Important in a World of Pervasive Technology

“According to the findings of a Cognizant study on how businesses and jobs need to evolve in the digital era, the economic impact of being behind your peer group in digital is huge,” writes Don Tennant, a writer on IT management and career topics. “For large enterprises, this “laggard penalty,” as the study calls it, can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of lost economic opportunity just over the next few years. In an email interview following the release of the study called “The Work Ahead: Mastering the Digital Economy,” Paul Roehrig, Global Managing Director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant, provided some valuable commentary.” Excerpts:

“If you want to master the digital economy, be a better human. As noted in the study’s findings, it may sound counterintuitive, but in a world of more pervasive technology, activities that humans do well will be even more important in 2020 than today. Analytical thinking, communication, and learning skills are all critical now, but in the digital economy these very human activities — things we do naturally, but AI systems struggle with — will become even more essential in our personal and work lives, and for our businesses.

The study focuses on several industries — retail, banking, insurance, manufacturing, and life sciences — that collectively generate more than $60 trillion in revenue today (roughly the scale of about 40 percent of world GDP). What we found is that the impact of digital transformation on these industries between 2015 and 2018 alone could be up to $20 trillion. That number may sound too big to be true, but when you break it down, it seems a lot more realistic.

In many cases, leaders feel like regulation or a lack of clear ROI may be preventing innovation, but those arguments won’t last for long, as we’re starting to see real technology-fueled innovation in those sectors.

Even though there is concern about automation taking jobs away, senior leaders saw the positives in technology enabling work. For example, the study found that more than 60 percent of leaders said technology would help them be more creative and help them serve customers better; around 87 percent said new technologies would improve their productivity. The vast majority of leaders believe, as we do here at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, that it would be a mistake to short human imagination. As we have throughout history, we will continue to find plenty of work for human hands and brains.

When we think about impact on jobs, it's helpful to look at the kinds of work being done that make up ‘a job.’ In fact, we believe that many — many — more knowledge jobs will be altered by technology, rather than simply being ‘automated away.’

Throughout history, how we work — how we share labor, the tools we use, and so on — defines our societies as well as our specific industries and companies. From the Stone Age to the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, this has been the case. When the Internet — a new ‘machine’ — became accessible to many, knowledge work could be done wherever there was a smart person with a connection. This new technology opened up opportunities to distribute work in a new business model. It was similar to when physical work — like manufacturing — was able to be distributed globally once the labor and shipping costs got low enough to make economic sense.

These shifts have always resulted in massive value creation, and this won’t change as we move into the digital economy. What will matter most in the digital economy will be having the right skills to create value and innovate based on new machines — AI, algorithms, bots, big data — and new business models aligned to digital and physical products and services. And that can happen anywhere.”

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