A Strategic Framework for Task Automation in Professional Services

Abstract

Professional service jobs exist at the high end of the skill ladder; thus, some have assumed that highly trained professional workers are relatively immune to being replaced by automation. However, this assumption is a bit dubious because automation does not occur at the job level but rather at the task level, and some tasks within a professional job might be highly susceptible to automation disruption. This research builds on prior research by (1) empirically testing a model for automation of professional services and (2) developing a professional task-automation framework that shows how individual tasks within a given job can be enhanced or disrupted by automation in very different ways. Some tasks are augmented by automation and remain in the purview of professionally trained workers. Other tasks are deskilled by automation, allowing the tasks to be transferred to lower cost workers (who are aided by automation). Other tasks are moved directly to customers through self-service technologies, reducing or eliminating the need to interact with professionals or other workers. Finally, some professional tasks are centralized, which leverages professional workers’ distinctive expertise. Our framework shows precipitating conditions for each task-automation strategy and outlines logic for reconfiguring tasks within professional service systems.

Rise of the Machines? Customer Engagement in Automated Service Interactions

“…The seventh paper titled “A Strategic Framework for Task Automation in Professional Services” by Sampson (2021) explores the growing effects of (e.g., RPA-, ML-, DL-based) automation on highly skilled professional service jobs. Based on a proposed framework, the author argues that while some professional job tasks are augmented by automation, others are deskilled by it, allowing their transfer to lower cost, automation-aided workers.…”

Improving professional service operations: action research in a law firm

“…The recent growing body of work on how to organise high volume, low variety operations akin to service factories (Schmenner, 1986(Schmenner, , 2004Lewis and Brown, 2012;Giannakis et al, 2018;Sampson, 2020) is useful to address the above challenges. For instance, Harvey et al, (2016) report on the existence of significant amounts of standard work within professional service operations -stimulating the deployment of process analytics and improvement interventions.…”

“…Most recently, Sampson (2020) presents a model of service automation and a framework for reconfiguring tasks in professional service systems. There is still however not enough research on improving legal service operations and implementing change at an organisation level, and there is little empirical evidence on how and to what extent different legal services could be redesigned to better deliver efficiencies as well as increase value to clients.…”

Organizational Structure and Artificial Intelligence. Modeling the Intraorganizational Response to the AI Contingency

“…Overall, the authors are confident that rather than eliminating jobs, artificial intelligence will eliminate tasks from jobs [24]. Indeed, most of the automation seems to occur at the task level, not at the level of a job itself [25].…”

“…Although several attempts were made to understand the nature of the interrelationship between AI-related technologies and the structural characteristics of an organization [20][21][22]30,39,40,46], to our knowledge, this study represents the first in its kind addressing the issue systemically across multiple dimensions of the ideal-type of a typical organizational structure. Indeed, the previous studies were mainly concerned with micro job-related issues, both vertically [20][21][22][23]25,26] and horizontally [29,31,32]. The important mesolevel variables-mainly related to the span of control, number of hierarchical levels, centralization, standardization, formalization, and incentives-have been consistently neglected by scholars.…”