Member Article

Why the role of the clerical worker may vanish from Britain in just five years

If you are reading this in an office, look around you now and note down carefully what you see.

Look at the stacks of filing cabinets, in trays and out trays, post rooms and now your look at your colleagues. You won’t realise it yet but what you’re seeing could one day be recreated in an industrial museum and when you relay it to your grandchildren, they probably won’t believe what you tell them.

Working environments are changing in Britain, you may assume you already know this because you can probably remember that your very first computer was much larger and cumbersome than your current one.

Perhaps you started your career with a pager, regularly used faxes and simply wouldn’t dream of reverting back to them. But probably what you don’t realise is the pace at which working life is changing.

Myself and other artificial intelligence experts believe that the role of the clerical worker will have vanished from life in Britain within five years. Say it aloud and it doesn’t sound particularly radical but now look around at the office in which you are sitting, say it again and now visualise how it could revolutionise what you are see.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is rapidly changing. It is already sophisticated and can think and learn like a human being. It can read and understand the meaning of entire documents by learning the patterns of words and phrases in context. It’s this ability to learn which minimises the need for teams of clerical workers to carry out these repetitive duties. Because a machine can not only carry out these tasks but constantly learn how to do it better and faster means that clerical workers are no longer needed in the vast quantities they once were.

Correspondence, complaints and claims received by post, fax and email, must all be dealt with but AI is able to recognise and verify data to minimise the need for human intervention in all but essential tasks. More importantly, whenever human intervention is required, AI learns from this and therefore further reduces the dependency on clerical workers.

Consider the in trays and the out trays still dotted around your office and most have probably been empty for some time. And now think about the post room, the staff members who ran it have probably dwindled in size over time. AI’s advantages can come at a cost as according to a report filed last year by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the greatest loss of jobs between 2010 and 2020 is predicted for administrative, clerical and secretarial occupations, amounting to 387,000 jobs.

AI is a game changer and the advantage to customers who adopt it is significant including greater productivity, reduced costs, improved customer service, compliance, scale and efficiency. We are not quite at the stage yet where your new colleagues are likely to be robots instead of people but working life is evolving and is changing faster than most of us can comprehend.

Written by Andrew Anderson, CEO of Celaton which developed inSTREAM. inSTREAM transforms the way companies handle the correspondence that flows into their organisation every day including all financial and non-financial information received by email, fax, post and paper.

It enables scale and efficiencies that were previously impossible and minimises the need for human intervention.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Anderson .