Why robots will replace developers

We humans have a love-hate relationship with our technology. We love each new advance and we hate how fast our world is changing.
— Daniel H. Wilson

We all use robots, or robot-made products, on a daily basis. Throughout recent history robots have replaced humans, eliminating the drudgery of repetitive jobs and achieving new efficiency. It began in factories with menial manufacturing tasks, and today we’re seeing it in many white collar jobs. If you think about it, robots build our cars and clean our houses, but today we also enjoy these: AI applications automate financial, travel, and legal processes; e-discovery software, used in law firms, has replaced the document analysis and scanning formerly performed by paralegals; robo-advisers, such as Wealthfront and Betterment, take over for expensive financial advisers and make financial advice accessible to everyone. And this is just the beginning.

Why do we need robots?

Technology is driving our lives. New and traditional businesses invest heavily in technology, using it to constantly improve their efficiency and attractiveness. When we examine traditional businesses in the financial industry, health care, utilities, and education, we notice they rely greatly on and invest in IT.

To be able to respond to the growing demand for technology and its ongoing improvement, these organizations are forced to hire more and more employees, resulting in an overwhelming increase in operational costs.

The problem is that as business-driven needs continue to grow, this becomes a never-ending cycle. Adding more developers to respond to this growing gap has become an unscalable, unprofitable, and unsustainable solution.

Will robots replace humans?

To respond to market needs, organizations will have to incorporate more tools and more automation into their processes. Statistics show that enterprises are investing less in manual professional services and more in platforms and tools, hoping to reduce development time and costs and become more efficient.

To successfully replace IT workers and developers with “robots,” organizations must first identify the right opportunities: places where there are massive manual investments with fairly simple decision making. Once the tool is trusted, more complicated decision-making processes can be automated, accelerating time-to-market and offering a simple and seamless way to respond to business needs and requirements.

The more advanced the AI is, the more automation will ease the IT burden and the more that can be achieved. Robots, or robo-software, will eventually replace developers (as well as other functions in the software development life cycle) and will prove to be the only solution able to support the ongoing demand.

Developers should support this

Many developers oppose automation tools, fearing for their jobs and in some cases their unique expertise. However, the truth is that most IT departments fall so far behind demand that by accepting the usage of AI tools, platforms, and automation, they will successfully and effectively prove their efficiency and capacity. Many initiatives are blocked today due to IT constraints, whether due to time or human resources limitations. To fix this, AI, robots, and robo-software must be adopted by both high-level executives and on-the-ground developers for the benefit of the organization, its clients, and its employees.

Chen Levkovich is the cofounder and CEO of Zuznow, a mobile development platform.