In May 2013, research consultancy McKinsey & Company – renowned for its trend-spotting insights – published a widely read report that identified 12 critical IT-enabled business trends that the firm believes ‘have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools’. Examples of such business trends included ‘next generation genomics’, energy storage devices, and the rapid automation of knowledge work. While some of these trends still remain fairly abstract concepts or are relegated to niche uses, for business leaders and CIOs, the wave of automation sweeping across various industries is arguably one of the most visible and anxiety-provoking trends on the list. Already, some academics and economists are warning that automation inhibits real economic growth and job creation, while others wax lyrical about the transformative effects (economic and social) of supercomputers and advanced robotics. As automation moves into the realm of knowledge work, which McKinsey notes is already happening, the issue becomes both more pressing and increasingly polarising.

“Physical labour and transactional tasks have been widely automated over the last three decades,” the McKinsey report states. “Now advances in data analytics, low-cost computer power, machine learning, and interfaces that ‘understand’ humans are moving the automation frontier rapidly toward the world’s more than 200 million knowledge workers.”