George Danner, founder and president of Business Laboratory LLC and author of The Executive’s How-To Guide to Automation, published a whitepaper on technology for the automation era and four non-AI technologies for companies to embrace now. The whitepaper addressed the coming wave of automation and the inevitability of the change it will bring.

In the whitepaper, Danner explains:

“As we sit in 2019, we are poised for a coming wave of automation. Conceivably everything that can be automated—will be automated, from the writing of symphonies to flying a commercial airliner. Humans will remain “in the loop” as masters of these algorithms, but less involved in the mechanics than we have today. The automation imperative will be felt particularly strongly in corporations, as the drive for ever-increasing productivity creates a clear financial incentive for reducing the human content in processes and systems.

The Automation Era is inevitable. There is nothing we can do to stop it. What we can do, however, is embrace and exploit this new era. That means making our organizations ready. In my book The Executive’s How-To Guide to Automation, I outlined a number of steps that organizations can take to automate themselves—systematically, objectively, and methodically in a manner that minimizes disruption to the business.

In this paper, I will address just one aspect of the automation era: the technology underpinnings. Clearly many technologies will comprise the tapestry of what is needed to automate a sophisticated business. The most prominent of these is Artificial Intelligence (AI), but long before AI begins to replace human cognitive tasks, a foundation of non-AI-related technologies sets the stage for AI’s eventual use. Often these are technologies that fly a bit under the radar of many of the most informed business professional, so it is useful to highlight these here.

I have hand-selected a few of the more important non-AI technologies in this paper for your edification. Granted these are a subset, but having a working knowledge of what these technologies are, what they do, and how they work is a fundamental stepping stone to succeeding in an automated future.”

To learn more about the four non-AI technologies and the automation era that Danner is referring to, download the full whitepaper on technology for the automation era for more information.