Preparing for an Automated Future

“We’re driving toward a robot on every desktop,” said Tom Clancy, senior vice president of learning at UiPath. “Automation and robotic process automation is the fastest-growing enterprise software in the industry today.”

UiPath might be a long way from putting a robot in the hands of every American worker, but the company is putting one in the hands of 800 undergraduate business majors and minors at the College of William & Mary. The three-year partnership and the software gift, valued at $4 million, will allow each business student to access robotic processing automation software and training.

Robotic process automation (RPA) software -- the “bots” that UiPath specializes in -- focuses on automating rote computer tasks, such as opening folders, copying and pasting data, reading and writing databases, and scraping the web.

“Right now RPA is being used to take the drudgery out of people’s work -- it’s taking the robot out of the person,” said Kurt Carlson, associate dean for faculty and academic affairs at William & Mary. “It’s doing that by identifying existing mundane processes and automating them to free up time so that the employee can use that time to do things that are of a higher value to themselves or to the organization.”

Carlson said that the focus for William & Mary students won’t be on developing or using the software, though they’ll get some training on that, but rather on conceptualizing what business processes could be automated next.

“Anything that we do to expose them to RPA has got to be evergreen for at least 18 to 24 months, because that’s when they’re going to go to the job market,” Carlson said. “The technology is changing so fast that if we were to train our students on the technology as it is right now and then have them put that in a can and try to take it out to the job market 18 months later, they would understand the basics of it, but on the implementation side, they wouldn’t really be up to speed.”

A one-credit class, co-taught by Carlson and available to 400 students, will focus on understanding the potential of RPA.

“Let’s imagine that you had multiple of you who didn’t sleep, who could work faster than you could digitally, who never got bored and didn’t make mistakes,” Carlson said. “What kind of processes would you create that would bring value to society, to your life as a student, to your life as a person, to an organization that you might invent and create as an entrepreneur, or to an organization that you might join?”

“What we want to do is take our students and focus them on that kind of a mind-set,” he said.

Though the partnership is being piloted with business students, Carlson said that the goal is to bring RPA software to the computer of every William & Mary student.

Ryan Craig, managing director at University Ventures, a higher education investment firm, said he thinks the project is remarkable and similar to what Amazon Web Services is doing in higher education.

“RPA will transform the economy over the next decade,” he said. “I would suspect that many college graduates coming out into entry-level jobs will need to understand how this RPA software works, because it’s going to be an instrumental part of their work.”

Most entry-level jobs for college graduates today require students to work for a business enterprise and manage a software, he said. “One big reason why we have the challenges we have with college graduate employability is colleges neither train on the software nor do they train on how these businesses actually work.”

Many colleges don’t train students on Salesforce, a widely used business software that many entry level jobs call for experience in, he said. “They think it’s beneath them, or they think this is a generation that’s digital native that doesn’t need to be trained on this.” But understanding how to use an iPhone and Spotify doesn’t mean one understands other software, Craig said.

Kristin Sharp, a senior fellow at New America and partner at the venture group Entangled who has focused on automation, said that the “hands-on approach” is the right way to go for the company and the college.

“It's smart of UiPath to try to create a direct pipeline into their company's technology in partnership with a local school,” she said via email. “It's interesting that the program focuses on the design of the use cases of the technology -- using human discretion to make technologies work better and more efficiently in more situations is one of the biggest growth categories for jobs today.”

AT&T, Ernst & Young, Walgreens and Deutsche Bank are all investing in RPA, according to CIO magazine.

The software, which UiPath leaders emphasize frees up employees for more innovative work, also has the potential to save corporations millions of dollars by reducing their labor costs, in part by using robots where they once used people.

Worries over the potential economic effects of automation has been in ample supply over the past few years. A report from McKinsey estimated that by the year 2030, 23 to 44 percent of current work hours could be automated. Some research has suggested that high-skill workers are likely to feel the sting of automation more often than low-skill workers, who will in turn feel it more deeply.

Andrew Yang, competing now in the Democratic presidential primary, has made automation anxiety a hallmark of his campaign. “Technology is now automating away millions of American jobs,” he said on the debate stage earlier this month. “We automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and we’re about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck driving jobs and on and on through the economy.”

Some experts believe the fear is overblown, such as a few on the far left who believe technological innovation could bring about “fully automated luxury communism,” a utopian world model where robots do all the work and class distinctions are abolished.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, has said that he doubts automation is even really happening at scale. “Predictions are hard, especially about the future, and maybe the robots really will come for all our jobs one of these days,” he wrote in The New York Times. “[But] if robots really were replacing workers en masse, we’d expect to see the amount of stuff produced by each remaining worker -- labor productivity -- soaring. In fact, productivity grew a lot faster from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s than it has since.”

Unfounded or not, Pew Research Center suggests that 72 percent of Americans fear an automated future.

“In our very first session, we’re going to have a series of mini-vignettes where we’re going to talk about ethical issues of automation and robotic process automation specifically,” said Carlson. “It’s important that our students be aware of the issues, and conversant on them, and take a position. We’re going to be relatively agnostic, but we’re going to lay out the case for and against.”

Clancy said that UiPath in turn has committed to training 750,000 workers in the next five years. “To remain competitive in the future of work, countries need to make sure they’re investing in their people,” he said.

Craig said that the workforce issue doesn’t need to be a big focus for four-year institutions. “Four-year colleges and universities are preparing students for jobs that are not those jobs, in theory,” he said. “It speaks to the fact that we need more faster and cheaper pathways to good jobs, and we shouldn’t be requiring everyone to go through six years and 120 credits at a higher education institution to have a shot at a job that might be less of a job or not as attractive of a job in five years or 10 years than it is today.”

As far as the next steps for UiPath, Clancy says, “I think community college is a great place to learn RPA going forward.”