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Is the pandemic accelerating automation? Don’t be so sure
- aaron695 5y ago> Yet Australia’s unemployment rate is nearly as low as before the pandemic. This is because Australia closed borders and lost 300,000 poorer foreign workers. Which is not great if you care about people globally. If you want to look at automation, skip the SciFi robots and look at Amazon uptake, which seems like it got a jump. I would expect Amazon is more automated than normal stores? Not sure if teaching the population how to work from home is called automation or not. But robots cost a lot more than sick people, so the general premise is correct. Companies won't buy robots because people are getting sick.
- Closi 5y agoI do automation consulting as part of my job (amongst other consulting for logistics) and can anecdotally say that automation enquiries have gone down slightly. Business cases for logistics automation work best when you have stable demand (so you can get good utilisation out of the kit, and know how much you need to build) and the level of uncertainty means it’s tough to work out what your order pattern might look like in the future. It’s also much harder to scale up an automated site during growth periods compared to a manual one. I suspect there will be a lag on investment as companies work out what post-covid demand patterns look like.