This awakened his entrepreneurial spirit. “It makes you fairly Teflon-coated,” he told The Evening Standard in 2018, recalling how plant workers would cheer with glee whenever he was fouled during after-work games of five-a-side soccer.Īfter upgrading his business education, Bathgate spent eight years in process improvement at Bradford & Bingley Building Society and four years delivering software solutions to enterprise customers like Barclays Bank at Lynx Financial Systems-where he noticed a lot of potential productivity gains being left on the table because overworked IT departments served as a bottleneck to digitalization. During this period, he spent some time using a stopwatch to monitor productivity of factory workers in the printing industry while it was being disrupted, an experience that prepared him for being labelled a purveyor of workplace doom after founding Blue Prism. Before getting an MBA at the University of Leeds, he worked in financial services, consumer goods, and manufacturing. Hoping to find something more exciting, he switched his major to management. While training to be a number cruncher, Bathgate quickly realized that not all work is created equally enjoyable. Blue Prism’s CEO comes across more like an accountant, which makes sense considering he once studied to be one at Manchester Polytechnic. Fuji, where Inaba would issue orders from “a cavernous conference room with a huge electronic projection screen and a stunning view of the snow-capped peak, a yellow helicopter on a nearby landing pad, and pretty yellow-smocked young women who bow waist deep and trot off to execute their master’s soft-spoken commands.”īathgate, 55, doesn’t fit this robot overlord mold, and not just because his company doesn’t build physical robots that look like amputated limbs off Autobots like Bumblebee in the Transformers movie franchise. But as Fortune noted in 1987, the nickname actually fit because Fanuc’s army of yellow industrial robots was built in a secretive complex hidden in a forest at the foot of Mt. For example, Seiuemon Inaba, former head of Japanese factory automation firm Fanuc Corp., garnered comparisons to Ian Fleming’s Dr. The movies can be blamed for a lot of what society thinks about robots, not to mention anyone in charge of an organization that builds them to do things better than humans. But that also means Bathgate’s perspective on the outlook for human jobs is based on actual experience in workplace automation. After all, as co-founder and CEO of Blue Prism, a Warrington, U.K.-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) firm, he runs a leading supplier of the world’s so-called digital workers. To be fair to the Negative Nellies, Bathgate’s opinion on this topic isn’t exactly objective. And when all is said and done, he argues the workplace robots being developed today will mostly be remembered as freedom fighters who unlocked human potential by liberating us from mind-numbing and time-consuming tasks. But as a former efficiency expert known for a blog entitled “Confessions of a Wino,” he sees many of today’s jobs in the same way that he sees unappealing bottles of crushed grapes, meaning some are not worth keeping around. Some jobs are destined to disappear, Bathgate freely admits. But he doesn’t believe that corporate bots will go down in history as ruthless terminators of economic stability. Predicting job losses on a scale that would make any cost and efficiency gains meaningless, the naysayers fret about the coming of “robo-geddon.” Alastair Bathgate firmly sits in the other camp. When it comes to the robotic invasion of capitalism, there are two schools of thought-one positive and one negative.
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