"Automation is a game of large numbers"

"Jobs are increasingly viewed as undifferentiated and interchangeable across humans and machines — the very definition of a commodity.
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Outsourcing — exchanging internal employees for external ones, often offshore — was a big step toward commoditization for many companies.[Moi ici: Mentalidade anglo-saxónica no seu pior, o foco nos custos acima de tudo e, passar ao lado das oportunidades dos nichos e da proximidade]
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Just as there are low-value and high-value commodities, there are low-value and high-value commoditized jobs.
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For many jobs, the value is driven less by their intrinsic worth but rather by market demand. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek visual analytic suggests that jobs that disappeared in the first four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016 were not lost to automation, but were lost because fewer customers wanted to buy the products and services they produce.
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For many organizations today, the next big driver of job commoditization is automation driven by smart machines. Simply put, if a job is viewed as a commodity, it won’t be long before it is automated. My research on automation through artificial intelligence (AI) or cognitive technologies suggests that if a job can be outsourced, many of the tasks typically performed by the jobholder can probably be automated — even by relatively “dumb” technologies like robotic process automation. Many global outsourcers are working desperately to create their own automation capabilities that could replace human jobs with machines.
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The key for financial professionals and other workers whose jobs have traditionally seemed safe is to make themselves less commodity-like. Automation is a game of large numbers, and it’s not economical to automate unique activities. [Moi ici: Mongo é um mundo de "large numbers"?] As long as human workers’ capabilities are differentiated from machines’ capabilities, then machines can’t easily replace them — and few organizations will be tempted to automate that niche."

Trechos retirados de "When Jobs Become Commodities"