Is Artificial Intelligence Ever Going to Stop Taking People’s Jobs?
So is artificial intelligence ever going to stop taking people’s jobs? This is Dave at actualhuman.com. Here’s another article from just this month where restaurants are now hiring robots that can cook food, serve it to the table, take the plates away, do the billing, and eliminate staff.

QR Codes and Automation in Restaurants
I was at a restaurant even just the other day that didn’t have all that, but what it did have was on the table—you’ve probably seen this, it’s not brand new—a QR code. And what the weight staff said was, when you’re done with your food, when you’re done eating, whenever you want to leave, just scan that QR code. It’ll bring up your bill; you can pay right on your phone, so you don’t have to wait for the check to come. They don’t have to run it back to the cash register, bill it out, give them your credit card, and that way it also frees up their table faster and gets you out the door faster.

Automation’s Impact on Labor
A lot of times, I know you’ve gone out to eat and you want to just get the check so you can leave. You could even pay for it while you’re eating, right? Is that an AI? Well, not really, but it does eliminate some hourly rate labor that the restaurant needs. That’s already happening now, even in restaurants that don’t have robot cooks.

Good or Bad?
Is that good or bad? Well, it’s good for you as a diner; maybe it’ll save some money, but on the grand scheme of things, the more automation that goes into any business, at some point it’s going to affect everybody. Even if you’re not in a business that’s automated by AI, your customers, the people that buy from you, if you’re in a consumer business, might be some people whose pay is getting cut because their business is affected by AI.

The Domino Effect
So there’s a domino effect, even if what you do can’t be done by somebody else. I’m sorry, can’t be done by AI. If the customers that you sell to, that you depend on for your income, if their work can be done by AI, at some point the money is going to stop flowing to them, which means it’ll stop flowing to you.

Anticipating AI’s Impact
So you have to look at the entire downstream of your business to see where is the AI going to affect your cash flow or is it going to affect your revenue, your top line. And if it’s something that is going to happen soon, you might want to look at maybe getting different customers, maybe putting AI in your business so you can save some money. Consider how this artificial intelligence is going to domino effect through the economy and at some point land on you to where it’s going to have an effect. If you anticipate that in advance of your competitors, you’ll be better served in coming up with new ways of doing business, new ways of structuring your company.

Staying Ahead of the Game
They call it pivot for a reason, and you can be ahead of the game so when this happens, even if it’s two or three years down the road, you’re already set up for it. In one of our businesses that does some vehicle title processing, we anticipated a major change two or three years before it happened, and we started getting away from some of the easy orders that we were getting because we knew at some point the easy orders were going to go away. That client base was going to be eliminated by some changes.

Embracing Hard Changes
A lot of our employees and staff were saying, why are we doing the hard ones? Why aren’t we just taking the easy ones? Well, we’ll still do the easy ones, but the hard ones are going to be there after this change happens. And sure enough, about two years later, the easy ones—that market went away. And had we not made that change, we would have lost 30 or 40% of our business without having anything to fall back on.

Competitors and Market Changes
Many of the other competitors in the marketplace, they were only doing the easy ones, figuring now I can just sit back, I don’t have to work that hard, and they’re out now—all out of business. They’re all gone, all out of business, which makes it more robust for what remains. So always be looking at your marketplace to see what’s there, to see what’s coming down the pipeline, and put yourself in front of where the revenue is going to be in a year or two, not where it is now or in the past.