There’s a fear that AI is going to take over our jobs – and with the advent of everything from self-driving cars to artificial customer service agents, it’s a valid concern. It’s especially fair when McKinsey, one of the most trusted global management consulting firms, predicts that as many as 800 million full-time employees could have their work displaced by 2030 due to automation.
Yes, that statistic is alarming. However, to use that data point alone is not reality. In fact, with the following statistics next to it, we can paint a much better picture for the future of work. According to the same McKinsey report:
- Less than 5 percent of occupations consist of activities that can be fully automated
- In about 60 percent of occupations, only one-third of tasks could be automated
So while some of our work may be automated in the next 10 years, not all of it will be. And quite frankly, who doesn’t want at least some part of their job automated? IT professionals are certainly up for it.
IT Professionals Want More Automation
IT teams continue to face growing pressures as new technology adoption results in more and more complex IT environments and organizational challenges. For example, IT teams are seeing a 64% increase in work with no change in the number of staff, according to 451’s Voice of the Enterprise Digital Pulse, Organizational Dynamics 2018 survey.
In a recent AppDynamics survey of 6,000 global IT leaders on application performance monitoring and AIOps, respondents identified automation as essential to their go-forward strategy.
To help alleviate some of these challenges, many organizations are now embracing AI as a critical piece of their IT ecosystem. In fact, 46% of today’s IT organizations at large corporations incorporate AI into their work portfolios – higher than any other industry – according to a report from Tata Consultancy Services. And instead of being concerned that machines will take over their jobs, IT professionals want more it.
In a recent AppDynamics survey of 6,000 global IT leaders on application performance monitoring and AIOps, respondents identified automation as essential to their go-forward strategy, specifically the following capabilities:
- Intelligent alerting that can be trusted to indicate an emerging issue: 49% of respondents identified this feature as core to their performance monitoring capabilities in the next five years.
- Automated root cause analysis and business impact assessment: 44% of respondents said solving problems quickly and understanding their impact on the business would play a crucial part of their performance management in the years ahead.
- Automated remediation for common issues: 42% of survey respondents need to build automated remediation into their strategy for performance monitoring.
IT Jobs Will Become More Impactful Once They Adopt an AIOps Mindset
An AIOps mindset is one that is focused on prediction over reaction, answers over investigation, and actions over analysis. But most importantly, an AIOps mindset never loses focus on customer experience or business performance. And it’s this mindset that will enable teams to reach their full potential.
With AIOps, teams will leverage machine learning to get real-time insights on their technology environment and automate its operations – a true game-changer that will help IT jobs become more meaningful, not less. AI based systems help identify root case, predict performance, recommend optimizations, and automate fixes. It simply helps problems get solved faster.
So now, the precious time and resources originally spent doing mundane tasks can now be better focused on driving new innovation and mission-critical projects for the business. And this is precisely the conversation that we need to have with our teams and peers: AIOps is not something to be fearful of. It will not replace our jobs – it’s going to elevate it.
