tisdag 29 januari 2013

IT-tjänster, ekonomitjänster och kundservice automatiseras

Enklare IT-tjänster, ekonomitjänster och kundservice som tidigare utlokaliserats ("outsourcats" på svengelska) till framför allt Indien automatiseras och försvinner:
IPsoft is a young company started by Chetan Dube, a former mathematics professor at New York University. He reckons that artificial intelligence can take over most of the routine information-technology and business-process tasks currently performed by workers in offshore locations. “The last decade was about replacing labour with cheaper labour,” says Mr Dube. “The coming decade will be about replacing cheaper labour with autonomics.”

IPsoft’s Eliza, a “virtual service-desk employee” that learns on the job and can reply to e-mail, answer phone calls and hold conversations, is being tested by several multinationals. At one American media giant she is answering 62,000 calls a month from the firm’s information-technology staff. She is able to solve two out of three of the problems without human help.
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A small British start-up, Blue Prism, has developed a software-development toolkit that allows people within a company to create their own software “robots” to automate business processes.
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The economics of Robotistan are certainly compelling. An onshore information-technology worker may cost $80,000 a year and an offshore one perhaps $30,000, wrote James Slaby, HfS’s research director, in a recent report. But Blue Prism’s robots cost at most $15,000 a year. They can perform only routine, rules-driven tasks, but there are plenty of those about. One telecoms company, says HfS, replaced 45 offshore employees, costing a total of $1.35m a year, with ten of Blue Prism’s software robots, costing $100,000.
Länk

Kanske är det dags att revidera föreställningen om att frihandel och globalisering sprider välstånd från land till land genom utlokaliseringar.