Automation technologies play an increasingly important role in our daily lives, including machine learning and robotics. McKinsey collected some of the most threatened workplace sectors in one nice infographic.

Automation now goes beyond routine manufacturing activities, and it has the potential to transform sectors like healthcare and finance, even though they involve a substantial portion of knowledge-based work. An American study demonstrates which sectors are most likely to be affected by the automation process, but they highlight that even though some parts of certain jobs are now could be done by machines, this does not necessarily mean that the whole job will be done by automation: automation is used more and more in order to make employees able to deal with remaining other activities that cannot be automated.

The study highlights that currently predictable physical work has a higher potential of automation than unpredictable environments. The below infographic shows seven main activity categories: managing others, applying expertise, stakeholder interactions, unpredictable physical work, data collection, data processing and predictable physical work.

The bigger the bubble is in the certain activity, the more amount of time is spent with it during work. The color of the bubble meanwhile shows us the automation feasibility in that particular activity in a certian sector. Therefore a big red bubble shows that a great amount of time is spent with that activity, but the automation possibilites are low. A big blue bubble means a 'threat' to human work, as those are time-consuming activities which can be reproduced by machines quite easily.

Keywords: machine learning, automation, hr, human resources, digitalization, labour market, technology, transforming industries.

Image credit: McKinsey (Read more)