Will robot workers dominate field service one day?

One of the longest pages on Wikipedia currently is “list of fictional robots and androids.” There have been enough robot-driven movies over time that Paste Magazine ranked 100 of them.

Robots hold an interesting place in our culture. They’ve long been held up as a symbol of the future, which is inherently interesting to many. But there are also causes for fear: will robots automate the majority of our jobs? Will robots rise up and rule over us, similar to plot points of many of the 100 movies ranked above?

Those are all (mostly) valid questions, but we don’t want to get too dramatic here. We just want to consider what the emergence of robotics could mean to field service management operations. And one important, often overlooked, aspect is how robotics and the cloud combine to produce exponential disruption. Let’s call it cloud robotics.

Consider this. If you essentially move the ‘brain’ of a robot to the cloud, you reduce onboard processing costs. You also increase functionality, as skill upgrades for robots will be easier to manipulate and design. Think of robots as the hardware, like your smartphone, and there can be an app store for these skill upgrades. If robots embedded with sensors can learn about their environments, they can share what they learn to a cloud storage area, which can be accessed by similar robots, who in turn become smarter and more efficient. All these steps working in sequence will help drive down costs and make robot knowledge bases more accessible.

If that’s achieved, how could robots benefit field service?

The simple tasks

This is the aspect we often ignore when worrying about automation concerns. If robots come online in a cost-effective way for FSOs, the robots can focus on simple, mundane tasks at client sites (or even in your back-office.) Also, consider the Amazon robots that go back and forth to collect items. This robotic assistance allows the human workers to focus on problems and client concerns that require a greater deal of complexity. So, rather than worrying about losing your job to a robot, the ‘always look on the bright side’ approach would be: “Robots in field service means I can focus less on the rote logistical tasks, and more on higher-order problem solving, thus making myself more valuable.” We hope that helps alleviate any concerns.

Dangerous, hard-to-reach assignments

Robots would likely be able to do client work underground, underwater, or in other hard or impossible-to-reach locations for human technicians. This would be a major benefit for field service. We’ve written about the use of drones and how they can be used to scout electric lines or remote locations to diagnose the situations, saving the field technicians from making unnecessary trips.

Increased knowledge

While the human brain is fantastic in terms of its various capabilities, a cloud-connected robot ‘brain’ will be able to store more information than a human could. (Some robotic computers being put on the market now can achieve the same amount of research in one day that a human would need 38 years to achieve.) If the robot becomes an information hub that the human technician can easily access for information he or she might not have top of mind, this is a major value-add for the field service organization.

To briefly return to automation: NPR conducted a May 2015 study about different jobs and the chance they’ll become primarily automated in the future. Most field service-related occupations were actually very low on the list. This is based partially on the skill sets necessary to perform field service jobs, but also on one core fact. Even if a robot has 38 years of human research and manuals acquired in one day, most clients would much rather deal with a human on-site than an intelligent piece of machinery. The customer satisfaction aspect of field service is going to keep human technicians and back-office managers in the industry -- but hopefully with more time for higher-order, deeper-work projects if the robots can focus on some of the more rote, day-to-day tasks.

Field service is changing pretty fast. In just the past decade, mobile has totally shifted the industry to a new place. In the next decade, innovations around robotics, wearables, drones, and more could change the space even further. If you’d like to get a jump on visualizing the future of field service, download our eBook. We’ll walk you through some technologies emerging more and more in the marketplace and how those technologies could impact field service. It’s a good roadmap for the potential applications and implications for the future of FSM.

Written by Jim Hare