The honest shape of it #
A job is a bundle of tasks that happened to be given to one person, and those tasks come in two kinds.
Tasks that follow a rule
- They use information the business already holds
- They produce an output nobody would describe as a judgement
Tasks that require a person
- Somebody has to decide something
- Somebody has to notice something
- Somebody has to take responsibility for something
Automation eats the first kind. It does not do it evenly across job titles, it does it across task mixes, which is why two people with the same title in different businesses are in completely different positions.
The relevant question is what share of a week is spent on the first kind, and that is measurable rather than speculative. The test is set out in which jobs are worth automating, and the which tasks run on rules tool walks through it task by task.
What we are not going to tell you #
We are not going to say nobody loses work. It is the comfortable line and it is not reliably true. Where a role was almost entirely re-keying, chasing, formatting and forwarding, removing most of that can leave something that no longer supports a full time post. That happens, and a consultancy that pretends otherwise is asking you to discover it on your own later.
We are also not going to tell you it frees everyone up for more interesting work as though that were automatic. It is available, and it requires somebody to decide what the more interesting work actually is. Nothing about installing software produces that decision.
What we see most often in a business #
In businesses of five to fifty people, the common pattern is not a reduction in headcount. It is that the work nobody had time for starts happening.
- The person who spent Tuesday chasing paperwork spends it on the customers who were being neglected, which is usually where the revenue was going.
- A backlog that had become permanent gets cleared, because it turns out it was permanent for reasons of hours rather than difficulty.
- The hire that was being put off gets put off further, which is a real saving and a quieter one than a redundancy.
- Work that only ever got done when somebody was on holiday cover, such as reconciling or tidying data, starts getting done weekly.
That is not optimism, it is arithmetic about small businesses specifically. A business of eight people does not usually have surplus capacity waiting to be discovered. It has a list of things that are not getting done.
Where the exposure genuinely concentrates #
Being straight about this is more useful than being soothing. The roles most affected share three features, and none of them is a job title.
| Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| High volume, low variation | The same shape of task repeated many times is the easiest thing to hand over |
| The information already exists somewhere | Moving data between systems is work created by the systems, not by the business |
| Nobody would call the output a judgement | Where no decision is being made, there is nothing a person is uniquely needed for |
Conversely, work that involves noticing that something is off, handling someone who is upset, deciding an exception, or carrying responsibility for an outcome is not exposed in the same way, and generally should not be, for the reasons in what should always wait for a person.
If a role really does have to change #
Then it is an employment matter and it has rules. GOV.UK states that for a redundancy to be genuine you must demonstrate that the employee's job will no longer exist, that employees have the right not to be unfairly selected, and that employers must try to find suitable alternative employment within the organisation.
Two further points GOV.UK makes
It also notes that an employee can try an alternative role for four weeks, or longer if agreed in writing, without giving up the right to redundancy pay. Where 20 or more people at one establishment may be affected within any 90 day period, collective consultation rules and minimum periods apply.
Read that as a reason to involve advice early rather than a reason to avoid the subject. The expensive outcomes in this area are almost always process failures, not decisions.
The question worth asking instead #
"Will AI replace my staff" is a question about a technology. The question that actually changes anything is what your people would do with a day a week back, and whether that day is worth more to the business than their current Tuesday.
If the answer is obvious, you have your project. If the answer is that you do not know, that is worth finding out before spending anything, and the cost of admin time calculator gives you the first half of it.
The second half is a conversation about a normal week, which is what a free audit involves. How to have the conversation with the people concerned, before the rumour gets there instead, is in what to tell your team.