Hi, robot!

Rafał Ostrowski, ‘Eurobuild CEE’: Your company was set up last October. What exactly do you do?

Mariusz Pultyn, board member for technology, Digital Teammates: Our company produces software robots and hires them out to business services centres. Robots are ideal for performing the most mundane, mind-numbing office tasks – the kind of repetitive and tedious work that is still generally carried out by humans and probably shouldn’t be. This type of work does not require creativity – it’s basically just processing. And due to its routine character, it is susceptible to error, thus generating additional costs for the organisation.

What tasks are those?

In the financial sector: inputting bank transfers, posting, transferring data from one system to another, and monitoring loan agreements that are activated at specific points in time and then have to be checked to see if they have been properly executed. The cross-section of these tasks is quite broad, but basically it is what’s left to do in the bank after the systems are done and automatic processes have been completed. Somewhere down the line there will still be tasks not done by the systems – and there are a surprising number of these.

What do these robots look like?

These are software robots, so they have no physical form. Their activity is only visible in the form of the flashing diodes in server rooms and through the results of their work, which are the same as those of human employees.

So we are really talking about actual software. Why do you call them robots?

Because they do exactly the same work as a human being and in the same way, too. They move the cursor and enter the data. Of course, robots do not need a monitor for this, but if you connected one up you would see them doing this. At the end of the day you can say that it is a program, but the industry has coined the term ‘robotic process automation’. The metaphor is a bit philosophical, but it is termed a robot – even though it doesn’t have mechanical parts – because of the resemblance to what people do, although this is done in an automated way and according to a strict pattern.

How are robots changing work in the office?

Let’s look at what things are like now. Let’s say we have a ten-member team. Seven people in this team already have a certain amount of work experience but three have relatively little experience. When a new employee appears, the old guard tend to give them the worst possible things to do and leave to themselves those that require a little more experience, familiarity and knowledge. As a result new people can often get frustratedbecause they have carry out the most mundane tasks without any real prospect of things changing. Meanwhile, the more established personnel tend to get frustrated by having to constantly explain the same things to new people. But we are suggesting a solution to this situation. We want to take the three new people who are dissatisfied with their position in the company and get them constructing robots.

Aren’t the robots built by IT specialists?

No, they are not. You can see this even in our company. Along with our robot rental, we also have a BPO section with about a hundred people. Most of them carry out operations for MBank in the traditional way – inputting transfers, postings, etc. But since we launched a technological overlay that allows these employees to construct and service robots in March, ten people

have already ceased dealing with these previous operations and they have become ‘robot shepherds’. This is the term that we have come up with ourselves – robot shepherds are the people who construct them and then make sure they work correctly.

You don’t have to know coding?

That’s not necessary. There are many recognised platforms that allow you to construct robots using the drag and drop method. It is similar to drawing diagrams. The diagram is a manual for the robot, what to do in such and such a situation and how to proceed in another. For example, it shows the robot where to put the data in Excel and in which window to enter a given value in another program. There is no code there. Everything is done with a mouse – boxes are drawn and connected with lines.

What kinds of task are entrusted to robots?

Robots can be entrusted with everything that a person can do using a mouse and keyboard that does not require decision-making or creative thinking but involves certain procedures. Even if the robot performs 80 pct of the work that we normally do, it is still more profitable. Employees might even feel better if they only do the work that the robot cannot handle. This is not always the case, but sometimes it enables work to be done that is a bit more creative.

With robots do we still need a person?

No, the process never ends. We want to robotise new operations and we have almost unlimited possibilities for employing people. We can offer such a career path to virtually everyone.

Probably, until one day – when most operations have been robotised?

In the future, when robotisation has reached such a scale, we will begin to see savings, not only from the work of each employee, but also in terms of the office space, because robots don’t need it. For now, however, all the clients we have contact with are faced with the problem of having more work than people to do it. There is constantly more and more work. Although robotisation is considered to be a threat to employment, we still need more people for different things. At the moment almost 300,000 people work in business service centres in Poland and this number has been growing by tens of thousands a year. The only thing on the horizon that will limit this growth is not the prospect of robots replacing people, but the fact that the supply of labour will eventually dry up. And looking at the demographics, things will only get worse. These resources will run out one day. For the time being, there is no empirical evidence that the demand for human labour is set to decrease due to robots.

Why do you rent out robots instead of selling them?

The simplest answer is so that clients do not have a problem with this. The client does not have to worry about infrastructure or licences, or who will design them, or what will happen to them if they stop working. Our clients usually don’t have the time to develop such competences because they are absorbed in serving their own clients in the best possible way.

How many companies have embraced robotisation?

The natural recipients of this technology are business services sector companies, of which there are about a thousand in Poland. According to the data of the Association of Business Service Leaders in Poland, the main umbrella organisation for this sector, less than 30 pct of these companies have introduced robotisation or technology based on artificial intelligence. Almost 70 pct have yet to do so or are at the pilot stage.

Is there a lot of competition between the suppliers of these systems?

Consultancies are usually put in charge of introducing such systems. However, this also requires that the company using it builds its own team of specialists. They then run the project after the implementation stage, when the consultants have gone. And since consulting is expensive, this period shouldn’t last too long. It can still happen that after their first few experiments with robotisation companies come to the conclusion that it is just too much trouble and it’s not for them. But we offer something different – we supply both the robots and the service. There are very few such companies.

How much does it cost to hire a robot?

We assume that it is about half of the cost of employing one person.

In which ways should the real estate sector prepare for this change?

First of all, the real estate sector can benefit from the work of robots by increasing the efficiency of its own automated operations, in a similar way as other industries are doing. However, as regards the demand for office space, I expect that due to the significantly lower operating costs of combined human-robot teams, Poland will become an even more attractive place to locate service centres.