Robots taking over the world has been a staple of storylines in the dystopian science-fiction genre since as far back as the 1920s, but there is a growing sense that what was once confined to the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters is slowly becoming reality.
Indeed, numerous studies have been carried out recently with the aim of gauging the true impact of robotics on the job market, and depending on who you believe, robots could responsible for anything between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of current jobs by the early 2030s.
Sitting alongside emerging technologies like the internet of things, cognitive systems, and augmented reality, robotics is a critical innovation accelerator that has the power to create digitalised organisations, open new revenue streams, and change the way work is performed.
As a technology, robotics encompasses the design, building, implementation, and operation of robots for industry, government, and household applications. And from an application perspective, robots can be classified as industrial robots, commercial service robots, and consumer service robots.
Traditionally, robots have primarily been put to use in the automotive and metal industries; however, they are increasingly being deployed in sectors such as electronics, health care, retail, hospitality, logistics, agriculture, utility, and government — hence the rather startling figures above.
Whether those figures pan out or not, it is now undeniable that robotics has the potential to disrupt the business ecosystem across all industries, transforming long-established business models in the process.
Many businesses are already gearing up for this change and the global spending on robotics — including drones and robotics-related hardware, software, and services — are expected to total nearly $97 billion this year, up 18 per cent on 2016.
Looking further ahead, this figure will reach $230 billion in 2021, which represents a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 per cent. The convergence of robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will be responsible for driving a significant chunk of this growth, as the development of a new generation of intelligent robots opens up a whole new world of industrial, commercial, and consumer applications.
The benefits of this new generation are clear to see — they are increasingly easy to use, they can self-diagnose problems, they can learn and adapt on the job, they can interact cognitively, and they come with the added bonus of zero downtime.
The emergence of such revolutionary capabilities is driving wider adoption of robotics in the manufacturing sectors, where industrial robots have been deployed to carry out mostly hazardous, repetitive, and unpleasant tasks such as welding, painting, polishing, and heavy load material handling. And while these industries will remain the largest users of robotics over the coming, we are seeing a faster-growing trend in robotics adoption outside the manufacturing plant floor, such as in the construction, warehousing, logistics, medical and health care, utilities, government, and resource industries.
Indeed, the same benefits that are driving wider adoption in the traditional hotbeds of robotics are also enabling new uses to emerge in health care, construction, insurance, education, and retail — and it is these sectors that will see the fastest growth in robotics spending over the coming years.
By next year, 35 per cent of the world’s leading organisations in the logistics, health, utilities, and resources industries will actively be exploring the use of robots to automate operations, and as the years pass by, that proportion is surely set to grow as innovative new use cases continue to catch the eye.
In the health care sector, intelligent robotics systems are being used to assist surgeons in complex medical procedures and help patients with physiotherapeutic and rehabilitation treatment, while autonomous mobile robots are being used to deliver medical supplies within hospitals and clinics.
Similarly, in the hospitality and retail environments, mobile robots are being used to deliver room-service orders in hotels, provide instruction and guidance to customers, and even accompany shoppers to enhance their retail experiences.
Mobile robots in the form of automated guided vehicles are also being deployed more and more in warehouse operations to improve order fulfilment cycle time and overall productivity, particularly in eCommerce retailing, where same-day order fulfilment is becoming a competitive necessity.
As robotics proliferates across commercial services, robotics vendors will evolve their delivery models to include a “robot-as-a-service” approach, offering a more cost-effective and more scalable approach to deployment for businesses that had otherwise not considered the technology.
And once that happens, even the Hollywood scriptwriters themselves might not be safe from a new generation of robots brimming with dystopian ideas all of their own!
The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC). He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC. Content for this week’s feature leverages global, regional, and local research studies undertaken by IDC.
