Are the robots coming for white-collar jobs?

Automa­tion has long been seen as a threat to blue-col­lar jobs. How­ev­er, as the tech­nol­o­gy becomes increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed, white-col­lar careers could also feel the impact, affect­ing every­one from lawyers to CEOs. 

One of the com­mon wor­ries around dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is that many people’s jobs will be auto­mat­ed or replaced by tech­nol­o­gy in a quest for greater effi­cien­cy. Accord­ing to PwC’s Upskilling Hopes and Fears 2021 sur­vey, 60% of respon­dents are wor­ried that automa­tion is putting many jobs at risk, and 39% think it’s like­ly that their job will be obso­lete with­in five years. Last Octo­ber, a World Eco­nom­ic Forum report said 85 mil­lion jobs may be replaced with AI by 2025.

In the past, the jobs seen as at-risk were those that involve a high num­ber of rou­tine or repet­i­tive tasks, often in areas termed “low-skilled”. Accord­ing to PwC, most jobs that will be lost to automa­tion are rou­tine (such as under­writ­ing), repet­i­tive (like data entry) or dan­ger­ous (for exam­ple, fac­to­ry line pro­duc­tion). 

How­ev­er, the real­i­ty now is that many “high-skilled” jobs will be affect­ed to vary­ing degrees if tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues on the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry, says Alexa Greaves, CEO of AAG IT Ser­vices. These include nurs­es, lawyers, legal sec­re­taries, accoun­tants, trans­la­tors, mar­ket­ing man­agers and real estate agents, she says. 

“Pro­fes­sions and skills that are based on accrued knowl­edge and data-led deci­sions are all at risk from dif­fer­ent lev­els of automa­tion,” Greaves adds. 

Robots and the law

With US law firms invest­ing $1.5 bil­lion in robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA) in legal sec­tor offices between 2017 and 2019, the legal pro­fes­sion appears to be embrac­ing the tech­nol­o­gy — but does this threat­en lawyers’ liveli­hoods? “A robot may be able to pro­duce bet­ter legal doc­u­ments than a human can,” says Greaves, “but a lawyer who has expe­ri­ence in deal­ing with the sub­tle, social ele­ments of a case is still a valu­able asset.” 

Thanks to automa­tion, lawyers at all stages of their careers will take on less project man­age­ment, leav­ing more of their time free for actu­al legal work. Matt Abbott, pres­i­dent at recruit­ment firm The Sourcery, says that legal pro­fes­sion­als should stay pos­i­tive. 

“You might not need as many peo­ple for those jobs, but some­one has to man­age the whole process.” The RPA soft­ware can­not analyse its own pos­si­ble flaws or fix itself, so “once there’s an issue with the sys­tem or automa­tion, some­one has to unrav­el it com­plete­ly.” 

Automation and the CEO

Even the CEO posi­tion isn’t total­ly immune to automa­tion. Ear­li­er this year the busi­ness edi­tor of the New States­man, Will Dunn, asked: “CEOs are huge­ly expen­sive – why not auto­mate them?” As Dunn notes in the piece, the High Pay Centre’s most recent annu­al sur­vey of FTSE 100 pay pack­ages points out that “there is actu­al­ly quite sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial for com­pa­nies to safe­guard jobs and incomes by ask­ing high­er-paid staff to make sac­ri­fices.” 

So what is the future of the CEO? Vic­to­ri­an McLean, founder and CEO of City CV, sug­gests they will con­tin­ue to be in demand, because the role is a com­plex com­bi­na­tion of learned wis­dom, intu­ition and human con­nec­tion. 

“High­ly skilled, high­ly paid employ­ees are more like­ly to per­form roles that require cre­ative think­ing, the abil­i­ty to devel­op com­plex strate­gies and deci­sion-mak­ing, even if they use AI to help them solve prob­lems,” she says. “AI sim­ply can’t han­dle these func­tions or mir­ror the work­ings of the human brain — right now, at least.” 

Inno­va­tions in automa­tion might help us reimag­ine what a CEO is, but there will always be a need for a lead­er­ship posi­tion. “We may get rid of the CEO title,” Abbott says, “but that being said, there has to be some­one who makes deci­sions. There is still a need for the human ele­ment that has to make the calls. I don’t see too many high-lev­el careers going away with dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions. ”

Embracing the digital revolution

So how should these high-pow­ered work­ers pre­pare for an auto­mat­ed future in which their jobs remain, but are altered by automa­tion? 

These types of jobs tend to empha­sise the skills where humans always excel over the tech­nol­o­gy we have today or are like­ly to have in the near future. As Greaves says, “diver­si­fy­ing skillsets and focus­ing on so-called soft skills that are hard­er to auto­mate, like com­mu­ni­ca­tion and team­work, are like­ly to be good bets.”

“While robots may be intel­li­gent enough to per­form rou­tine tasks, they are not gen­er­al­ly intel­li­gent in the way that humans are,” says McLean. “Any cre­ative job — musi­cians, mar­keters, inven­tors — won’t be replaced. It also means jobs like ther­a­pists, coun­sel­lors, car­ers — any­thing that requires a human con­nec­tion — won’t be replaced.”

The real­i­ty is that the work­place and the work­force are con­tin­u­al­ly evolv­ing to incor­po­rate new tech­nol­o­gy and new ways of think­ing. It’s a chal­lenge as old as our con­cepts of white-col­lar work.  

“We know that 65% of chil­dren in pri­ma­ry school right now will work in jobs that don’t cur­rent­ly exist,” says McLean. “We also know that since the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, new tech­nolo­gies have changed the work­ing land­scape. We’ve lived through 150 years of change. Should we look at AI any dif­fer­ent­ly?” 

Prob­a­bly not. The work­place will always feel the impact of devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy, but human beings are end­less­ly adapt­able. Bring­ing automa­tion into the office will make our work­ing lives bet­ter, invent new jobs that fit the future work­place and save all of us some pre­cious time.