Automation, particularly when performed with AI tools, can result in firms speeding up processes by one or more orders of magnitude. As long as the scripting is properly tested, automating repetitive processes – particularly involving disparate systems – can provide firms with massive efficiency gains. That’s what the suppliers of these tools promise, and in most cases, this is the outcome.
Where’s the downside? Well, it turns out there are a few. As alluded to above, incomplete or improper testing of the automation scripts can give anomalous results. Bad data in, bad data out sort of thing. No one is manually checking scraped data anymore.
In many cases, the economics may not be beneficial. Automation tools are expensive, as are AI tokens. In one project I looked at a few years ago (when the automation tools were just hitting the market), it was cheaper for my client to outsource one part of their processing to an offshore affiliate than to automate that process. At that time, automation’s sweet spot was very high volume transactions across separate systems. We are talking tens-of-thousands per week. Having said that, I also found the scripting languages required a level of expertise somewhat akin to being able to code in Microsoft’s VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) – in other words, quite straightforward, but a new skillset that needed to be maintained nonetheless.
But *today’s* downside is as a website owner and administrator. Over the last couple of months, I have noticed an upturn in SPAM from people promising to improve my website, my SEO, my click-throughs, and my sales. The emails attempt to personalise to a granular degree by scraping key information from my website, and serving it back as if were evidence of a great attention to detail to my site. This data is collected by automation tools and turned into what the SPAMmer hopes is a compelling pitch.
What their automation tools don’t tell them – and what they are too lazy to confirm themselves – is that I’m not really a business. I don’t care about SEO results. I am an observer who occasionally blogs about things that I notice – good or bad. My company name is not ‘Business Coach & Advisor,’ and TEQ is no longer my online identity. But I get heaps of SPAM, daily, addressing me these ways. Lazy and unprofessional. Furthermore, they don’t seem to appreciate that in most of Asia, cold-calling (or SPAMming) is not the way things are done. Business people rarely give business to people they haven’t met or haven’t been referred to.
Powerful, productive tools are important for the advancement of society as a whole, and to individual businesses. There are enough issues with the use of automation tools and AI on society without even dealing with their misuse as applied to SPAM, phishing, security attacks, and the like. I accept that my bleating about this annoyance does nothing to address the issue; this is merely an observation (about a frustration). Furthermore, however, these idiots are demonstrating a total lack of business capability that their ham-handedness automatically rules them out of any consideration should I actually need SEO, development, or cybersecurity services.