How we innovate matters

The double-edged sword

That’s the double-edged sword; every employee understands that they work for a business and that businesses need to make money. Every company wants to be as successful and efficient as it can be. The task is to find an ethical balance that makes a business and its employees successful. I fear that the rush to automation, accelerated by the pandemic, is producing more complexity, introducing more inefficiencies, and increasing costs rather than adding anything beneficial.

RPA, AI-driven KM, etc.—these are technologies that I advocate for every working day. On the counterbalance, I have been a business owner and boss and had the deeply unpleasant task of laying people off more than once. But that’s the last resort, not the first point of call to building an effective and sustainable business. AI is with us, automation is the game’s name, and blockchain will disrupt organizations even further—this is all a given. But how we disrupt, innovate, and change is what really matters. Do we ride this wave of innovation and automation ethically or not?