A sea of ink and hours of video have been dedicated to the looming battle between humans and machines, often concluding that the machines win and human workers lose. It is a nearly irresistible narrative, which has been captured in books such as Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots and The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. It has also has inspired scholarship by academics such as Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University, who estimate that 47% of occupations in the United States could be automated within 20 years, and David Autor of MIT, who argues that the ability of machines to take on human jobs is vastly overstated.

At McKinsey, we are conducting our own research into the impact of automation on jobs and organizations and recently published a brief paper previewing some of our findings. The most important insight has been that it is far more useful to think about the activities that can be automated rather than entire occupations—handing over discrete bits to machines, like pulling out the most useful data from an analyst’s report, generating a report on the latest sales figures, or moving products around a warehouse. Smart machines have already demonstrated the ability to see patterns in information, understand what humans are saying (answering a question like “show me where sales rose the most last week”), and manipulate physical objects. Once these capabilities are applied to various work activities, few occupations or organizations will remain untouched.

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