Discussion and Questions about Automation in the Business World
Alright, so this subject has been bugging me for a while. I'm not necessarily concerned about automation, more curious so hear me out.
First and foremost it's obvious certain jobs are safer than others. Jobs like baristas, tellers, cashiers, waiters, truck drivers, data entry, and other simple and menial jobs are going to be some of the first. Trades, software/tech, engineers and other highly technical roles will be some of the last along with any job that require creativity like actors, musicians, painters and the like. Somewhere between these two extremes is the entire financial, legal and corporate world.
This seems to be one of the only forums to talk a lot about high finance jobs whereas if you go on another forum or read articles about the "financial industry being automted" they'll talk about family financial advisors and retail bankers. For this reason, I have a couple questions to the professionals on this site what they think about the future of our industry.
1) What do you think the first jobs in finance will be to completely automated? Some are already disappearing like trading, and equity research. Do you believe these parts of finance will be completely done by robots in the next 10-20 years?
2) When do you think professional service jobs like M&A/IB, law and, consulting will be automated?
What about accountants, auditors and tax professionals working at the Big 4?
Lastly, what about PE or VC?
3) How bad would corporate roles be affected like corporate finance, development, strategy, legal counsels, etc? Would you say less or more so than their professional service counterparts?
4) Between the safer jobs like IB and the automation in progress jobs like ER, we have things like PWM and Investment Management who some say is dying and others say are doing fine. How bad do you think these jobs will be affected in the next 10-20 years? Is it still possible for college students to make a career out of this?
5) How bad will sales jobs be affected such as CRE investment brokerages, software sales, financial sales, medical sales, etc?
6) What do you think the future will be like for our society?
Will everyone eventually be given a universal basic income as 90% of the population will no longer be working?
Will we all turn into creative artists and philosophers?
Will humans improve ourselves through innovative technology to make us rival the intelligence of robots?
Will the government restrict companies to only automate a certain percentage of their workforce?
Will robots take over the world?
Or will we become Luddites and go into a dark age?
Looking forward to seeing some answers!
Hi grandpajohnathan, check out these links:
Hope that helps.
bump
Not currently in the industry so I cant answer but I'm interetsed to see some responses.
bump
Interested on knowing when audit will eventually be automated.
I personally think it could happen sooner rather than later. Audit is one of the areas that won’t just get cheaper, faster, and more efficient as an automated process, but it will also get better (more high quality), in my opinion. I only interned at big four for one busy season, so maybe I’m an idiot, but the amount of fudging of selecting/testing and justification of questionable client decisions I saw was honestly scary. Rules-based AI wouldn’t be able to do these things, so arguably the quality of audits would improve. I’m pretty sure the big four are all working on software to incrementally automate things, and a couple years ago when I interned, we already were doing some automated testing of areas conducive to it. There will always be people to manage the process and decide what risks we’re okay with, but staff sizes probably will need to shrink over the next decade.
At the same time, I think it’s important to realize what this means, and the following applies to a lot of finance roles that will be automated. Yes, audit is going to get automated at certain levels, but the industry will then audit deeper and more completely, so while staff won’t have to waste time doing stupid cash testing, maybe it means the teams will stay the same size but we can now audit more important areas deeper, etc. I think that applies to other areas. Easy stuff will get automated, which just frees up the ability to offer better service.
There was an article recently, an AI outperformed top lawyers in a review of cases, making less mistakes in something like a handful of seconds, to do something that they took hours to do.
Law risks being fucked hard and accounting too.
Anyone know how banking, PE and corporate development could possibly be affected by automation?
Magnam ut aut et iste temporibus excepturi ratione. Sed ut consequatur rerum. Aut quas commodi aut. Eum similique earum voluptatem impedit. Doloremque cum optio hic. A quia fuga aliquam assumenda asperiores nisi repellendus.
Sit natus dolorem dolorem omnis in facilis occaecati dignissimos. Officia corrupti non hic. Facilis harum ut voluptatem accusamus distinctio. Iste eum libero et omnis architecto neque. Ut sunt aut esse ut.
Deserunt a et occaecati consequatur optio dolorem occaecati. Harum vitae quod tempora sequi saepe quo corrupti voluptates. Doloribus sequi rem ipsum non quia.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...