A Cost it is techically a someone else Revenue.
So it is necessarily a relative concept that must be analyzed only from the individual perspective.
From the global optic it become just an incentive and an information to determine the flows of human behaviors, and consequently of developements and efforts.
Technologies shape, since when the humans exist, the structure of human society, the methodologies of actions and frameworks of decisions.
But into appling new techologies curious phenomena happens: emotion can make our decisions biased or our analysis opaque.
Who is scared will tend to minimize the esitmations and who sees opportunities will tend to increase the hype.
And when our emotions and random geopolitical events happens, new ways of coinceve business and new players start to have space to enter into markets in which older players are too scared to innovate.
Having a strong position on the market can bring to take weak future decisions since there are conservative internal pressures to remain the known confort zones.
This generate opportunities for new brave players, whic allow them to exploit other people fears and negligence.
A similar systemical situation is happening right now: the increase in leveraging of US Companies (9 Trillion Corporate Debt) is generating some uncertanties in the market, that in the recent financial history bring to the famous Yield Curve Inversion, one of the most famous recession predictors (since it is used as an indicator of the level of the trust of the market in the next future).
Also consumes weakening, Trade Wars and European economic stagnation (worstened by Brexit uncertainity) bring recently the FED to cut Short Term Interest rates to try to stimulate the market.
All those signals generate pressures (on the most receptive companies) to innovate, increasing the productivity and reducing costs to survive on the market.
Since the modern era, the service sector (production as a function prevalenlty determined by human cognitive capital) became predominant because of technical difficulties in replicating and automating cognitive abilities and tasks that require experience.
Consequently there are great economic incentives – for the brightest mind in the world – in terms of potential profits, to find a way automate those tasks, an event that is becoming more and more possible thanks to digitalization and information age.
Computational power is becoming every year more efficient and algorithms are combined to generate the Cognitive Computing ecosystem.
And to reduce systemical risk of the bank system, the predominantly cause of the past financial crisis, is necessary that the fiancial intermediares get stronger preparing to automate business functions, and consequently to be ready to reduce costs in terms of human capital if a financial crisis happen.
Deal Link is just one of the first examples of Cognitive Computing applications who “automatically tracks legal and compliance reviews and can fill in forms and generate reports for managers.”
If the back-office looks at risk of being automated, also the front office can’t completely be defined as safe.
Sales depend on comunication and persuasiveness of a message, that relay on the likealability and the similarity to the client point of view.
Nothing more than a machine can process data and information necessary to predict effectiveness of a particular message on a definite category of individual.
This starts to be scary if you mix it to new AI Assistants techologies developed by Companies as Google that can make calls imitating the human voice.
Obviusly it is difficult to estimate with certainty where all these new technologies will take us, and is unlikely that tomorrow half of the employed population will be fired, but at the same time it is interesting to notice where this new ecosystem and new way to coinceve business will go.
Are we sure that the new business processes in 10 years in order to be managed will require an expert in one domain ? In my personal opinion the answer will be no, and it is time to start to think about educating people to develop expertise in 2 or more area (especially related to new technologies environments).
The likely coming financial crisis will generate new opportunites for innovative economic players, exploiting the weaknesses of the distracted old gigant on the market, and Cognitive Computing will be determinant to emulate on large scale the business units that in the past could be executed only by the human capital.
Very interesting.