Automation

“Because we can go to a gold mine right now, go to a gold mine CEO and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year. Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output.”

“Ultimately, the future of American manufacturing is not just automation, it's configuration”

“The problem is that if we get the Trapped in this automation mindset, we are leaving on the table so much more value for what AI could be doing for not only human work, but human wellbeing, human interactions, human relationships.”

“Right now automation is moving faster for white collar work and office work and knowledge work than it is for blue collar work in terms of robotics.”

“So the number of accountants basically went up every decade in the 20th century, even as we've had successive waves of automation going through accounting because the job changed when you automated it.”

“A lot of updating things across the board, updating things for your managers, creating reports. That's probably, 80, 90% of the work today, which I think can be automated”

“Automation is going to actually just force us to see the next set of bottlenecks that are in all of these industries that we didn't perceive that we had before because everything was so slow and manual.”

“Once you start automating a few things, you find that your own brain starts to get better at spotting opportunities because you're like, oh, I remember this other thing I did that was kind of like this. I can probably do this in the same way or the same versio…”

“With AI and automation, it's not eighty-twenty anymore. It's ninety-nine-one, which is like the right decision at the right time Will always outperform effort alone, and the one percent of things you choose to work on will now drive 99% of your results.”

“Mostly because I knew it will decrease my churn. Because when people need to post manually, if they get discouraged, if they don't post, they'll cancel the subscription. But when people are posting with automation, that's a whole different story.”

“It seems like bill payment, Has proven over the past 40 years uniquely resistant to automation and modernization.”

“In science, I don't think there is a finite appetite or a finite capacity for science. I don't think science is like a scarcity thing. Like there's, you know, 100 more discoveries left to be made and then we'll be done. And so like we're displacing jobs. I thi…”

“In the past, there would be a team of, let's say, 300 that would do the manufacturing, and they can get the same output with about 182 hundred.”

“One of the things that we say is automation drives escalation. You know, as I automate something, more and more people, the Alex's of the world are pressing zero and asking to talk to the operator. And that isn't coming away.”

“Despite the headlines, despite how much demand there is in this market, and how much software's changed over the last few years, it's so far away from being automated. It's so inefficient. Building software in a professional setting, especially with, you know,…”

“So first, I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something where it's fragmented. I find something where we can buy things at reasonable prices. I find things where technology is, would, could be used.…”

“Automation doesn't actually work for this IT use case unless it's faster to automate something forever than to do it manually once.”

“Just like automation is a better place to be than productivity enhancement. Like one of the challenges with our business, I think with a lot of the coding businesses is just like proving the ROI. Like, and there've been these studies that show like, you know, …”

“Start with listening and not with tools and automation. So many times companies are like, well, I'm just going to build this tool or going to, I'm going to build this thing. Often you build a thing that you yourself have had a challenge with, or that like is e…”

“So what are the folks that are actually deploying like automation at scale doing? They're finding ways to mix and match deterministic workflows with agentic workflows and do those together.”

“You don't even need it to be a super fancy automation because the amount of time that's being saved, even with the final copy step, and you want the human in the loop anyway, to do that review, you're still saving such a huge amount of time that it's worth it …”

“Shallow content was never enough, but really deep content still requires a lot of work. And it's not something that can be easily automated around, but you really need that core expertise.”

“I think like mediocrity now is not hard to automate.”

“The future of automation is prompt to automation just because I think that people Don't want to sit and make workflows all day, especially like non-technical people.”

“I would imagine there is more embodied AI in 2035 as compared to today. If that is true, then that would lead to a lot of automation of, or having AI powered in day-to-day work, like folding your laundry, or, you know doing things which are considered chores.”

“What I've noticed in private equity and some other places is Sometimes to boost margins or make the business look really profitable in the short term, people will make these sort of like naive short-term decisions, but in reality, everybody should be investing…”

“If the developed world wants to have those services which, you know, the developing world is enjoying, so they need to automate a lot of it.”

“In an ideal situation, my expectation of you is that each and every one of you, and it doesn't matter what you do, Is going to replace a hundred percent of what you do with automation.”

“Before you can automate, you need to operate something, you know, and it could be a three-step thing that's taking you five minutes, 10 times a day, and then boom, you've basically saved an hour right there. So I would start with that simple three-step automat…”

“If you want quick wins, actually, don't go for like the sleek demos, I would say, automate the boring stuff, and we'll see lot, and this is again very counterintuitive, but if you want traction, I think the, ah.”

“Well, I think we're well past the threshold where the models are powerful enough that you can be using them to automate massive things.”

“Yeah, we need to bring back manufacturing, but it's not a jobs program. That's for sure. In fact, the only way we're going to bring it back is if we automate significant amounts of this and maybe the guy who presses the on button every morning gets paid, you k…”

“You know, it fails randomly two out of 10 times, which might be fine in a supervised setting like ChatGPT. You know, where you're talking with these sort of assistants but it doesn't really work in an automation case where it's hands-off keyboard running on a …”

“Oftentimes, I got a lot of advice when I was, you know, running seven, absolutely about 7,000,010 million. They're like, it's people first. It's people first. You got to think about people. And what I ended up realizing is like, that's actually bull. It's not …”

“And we often find many of the POCs turn into, they don't require complex AI, new model development and things in that space. They require simple automation. So they require more or more data, right? Or more programmatic changes in how the application is operat…”

“I do think that there's an interesting thesis I heard that the path to real re-industrialization in America is not Not through trying to play the last war, but instead focusing on the next war, which is humanoid robotics, and if we really get that right, and w…”

“The laziest people are the wealthiest people. And in what I mean by that is if you can figure out how to automate a lot of what you're doing and if you can figure out how to get good economics, then you've got a business on your hands.”

“The first aspect is, is that humans aren't gonna work. I don't think that that's ever gonna be the case. I think that humans are kind of built to work. I think that we have kind of an inherent Motivation to work, to create, to make things. And so I think that …”

“People tend to jump right to full automation when really what is incredibly valuable in the short run is augmentation of people on, on aspects of what they do.”

“I have some friends running, let's say, the current generation of, you know, these people, too, of, like, sort of tech-eating services companies in traditionally very fragmented industries, and, like, in a small room, they would say, man, like, Sarah, Elad, th…”

“So I think that, like, even though maybe the first iteration would only have been a substantial improvement compared to some other companies, if you give it one or two more years, it will definitely be an improvement versus what any other company is doing with…”

“And what I learned through this process was that farmers are a really strong business people. They have to be because all the ones who aren't have gone out of business. And even some of the ones who are really good have gone out of business, right? It's a toug…”

“So they initially start with some kind of business process engineering, which is pure, you know, it's working on the flowchart and understanding how you can remove unnecessary trips in the process. But after that, automation is the only game in town.”

“And we think that, you know, over the next 20 years, automation is that next platform shift, similar to the digital transformation we've seen over the past 15.”

“The assumption in our field forever has been that we're, we automate the low value tasks first you know, like cleaning toilets. And then later we automate, you know, graphic design or something. And it turns out it's like the other way around, right?”

“I think we're going to have frontline workers for a very long time because some of these jobs are difficult to automate.”

“The industries that have higher levels of automation also, also grow faster.”

“In our experience, a lot of the need or the interest in automation comes from companies that fall into the realm of what we tend to call tech motivated. And so there are companies that are not technology companies by trade but rather companies that are, you kn…”

“So I marched around the country for six years trying to help entrepreneurs and startups and growth companies in Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, New Orleans and so I saw the aftermath of the automation of manufacturing jobs and then Trump wins in 2016, so I thi…”

“AI plus automation is, is going to create, for example, the world's best salesman or salesperson.”

“And I think the interesting thing that comes with all this automation is, you know, of course energy will start to dominate the cost equation when it comes to manufacturing.”

“As that automation has happened, it's allowed higher order services jobs to emerge, and that will be the progression of humanity forever.”

“In the Turing Trap article, I argue that, as I said earlier, while both of those strategies can in principle be profitable, right now there are excess incentives to focus on substitution and automation, and then not enough to focus on complementing humans.”

“That the data seems to show is that companies who invest in robotics, automation, AI grow. But it's companies that don't that shed the job.”

“We found that whether it be a payer or providers, hospital systems, they really didn't care three years ago about efficiency automation. They cared about revenue enhancement, but they really didn't care about efficiency, and they threw staff and bodies at ever…”

“If automation is the future of manufacturing, Then electricity and energy ends up being the biggest cost driver for those systems. And if our, if everything is on parity and everyone's got the same automation systems, whoever's got the cheaper energy wins.”

“The low cost model of consumerism in the United States, which has been a stronghold for our economy for a hundred years at this point, Maybe coming to an end, or it will accelerate the implementation of automation across that sector of the economy.”

“And I actually think there's going to be a whole new job That is just basically like software supervisor. Like, I just think that's going to be a job like software is going to replace what a lot of people do, but then it's going to get stuck and it's not going…”

“Ultimately it's all the same thing. It's all the same trend, which is basically turning companies from sort of like analog companies that run on, you know, sending Excel spreadsheets around with a lot of manual processes into companies that are intelligent and…”

“These current trends will accelerate a trend towards more automation of low cost labor because it now will make sense for businesses to invest in the capital, in the capex in the infrastructure, and ultimately for technology companies to build that that, that …”