By RJ Rojvirasingh, Managing Director at MAD APPE DEVELOPMENT CO., LTD.
There are so many things that we’ve gotten used to in the past few decades; for example, ordering food via phone, booking a hotel through a website, getting our groceries from the supermarket, or even simply buying things from a retailer. If you look closely, so many changes happened, and it’s likely you didn’t even realize they were happening. The use of landlines has dropped dramatically in the past few years, and people in Thailand are now getting things delivered via digital services like Line Man, Grab, and Uber Eats. Airbnb, while not replacing hotels, has pretty much made it possible for people to have their own “hotel”. Some people have even invested in house renovations in order to become one of the hip places listed on Airbnb, and Airbnb didn’t even need to lift a finger.
These changes that you may not have noticed, are becoming the trends of the future, not just to the individual, but to companies all over the world. Large organizations in Thailand have invested over 600,000THB per month on their marketing departments, and a few hundred thousand per month for the services of digital marketing agencies. The question is, “Why”? Why would a large organization invest 600k to keep their marketing teams doing the tasks that could eventually become obsolete? Isn’t it obvious that all departments should start to apply a digital mindset in all that they do?
It’s likely that the year 2018 will be the year when individuals and companies will be implementing changes to their skills and mindsets, because some platforms are already on the verge of replacing human skills. Adobe Marketing Cloud is the perfect example of this scenario. Currently, people make decisions for online advertising campaign budgets based on both offline and online stats. The Adobe Marketing Cloud is an automated platform that tracks things the human mind can’t even imagine, manages multiple campaigns, and even decides whether a particular campaign should be stopped or deserves additional funding.
For some reason, I don’t want to look beyond the next ten years as I believe that startup platforms will keep replacing human skills and force people to change, hence, new kinds of jobs will probably pop up every other year. However, there are probably two skills that cannot be replaced by AI, and that is Artistic Skills and Psychological Skills, because a computer cannot create the right design for brands and a computer will never understand what Tom Hanks from the movie “Sally” called, “the HUMAN FACTOR”.
