How Much Will Artificial Intelligence Change Job Markets?

It remains difficult to predict just how much artificial intelligence will affect a growing range of jobs. In what might prove to be an optimistic outcome, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation will likely mean 16 percent of U.S. jobs will disappear by 2025, some estimate.

However, such technologies will also create new jobs, such as robotic engineers and technicians, data scientists, and content curators, amounting to a nine percent job increase to 2025, Forrester Research now estimates.

Optimistically, humans will be left with more “person to person” jobs and “higher value” work.

On the other hand, such forecasts might prove, at least in some cases, to be too pessimistic. Many made the same predictions when automated teller machines  were widely adopted in the 1990s.

Since 2000, the number of bank tellers has increased two percent annually, however.

But banks also shed about 25 percent of people in the back office staff.

Forrester Research forecasts a net job loss of seven percent. Office, sales, and administrative support jobs will be "the most rapidly disrupted", says Forrester.

The number of white collar office workers, of which there are 89 million in the U.S., is forecast to decline by 12 percent between now and 2025.

Nor are gains and losses equally distributed. When economies evolve, it very often happens that gains are reaped by one segment of citizens or workers, while others are harmed.

Few likely really believe that when steel mills and auto plants are shut down that workers actually wind up in new high-paying jobs in growing industries. There might be winners, but there surely are losers.

Eventually, one has to wonder how machine learning and artificial intelligence will affect many jobs in the communications business, beyond the simple matter of firms needing to reduce operating and capital costs that almost necessarily require job cuts.

How much of the complexity and difficulty of buying and using communication-related services will be made much easier as we apply AI to the process of creating, delivering and selling services?

source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

How Much Will Artificial Intelligence Change Job Markets?

It remains difficult to predict just how much artificial intelligence will affect a growing range of jobs. In what might prove to be an optimistic outcome, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation will likely mean 16 percent of U.S. jobs will disappear by 2025, some estimate.

However, such technologies will also create new jobs, such as robotic engineers and technicians, data scientists, and content curators, amounting to a nine percent job increase to 2025, Forrester Research now estimates.

Optimistically, humans will be left with more “person to person” jobs and “higher value” work.

On the other hand, such forecasts might prove, at least in some cases, to be too pessimistic. Many made the same predictions when automated teller machines  were widely adopted in the 1990s.

Since 2000, the number of bank tellers has increased two percent annually, however.

But banks also shed about 25 percent of people in the back office staff.

Forrester Research forecasts a net job loss of seven percent. Office, sales, and administrative support jobs will be "the most rapidly disrupted", says Forrester.

The number of white collar office workers, of which there are 89 million in the U.S., is forecast to decline by 12 percent between now and 2025.

Nor are gains and losses equally distributed. When economies evolve, it very often happens that gains are reaped by one segment of citizens or workers, while others are harmed.

Few likely really believe that when steel mills and auto plants are shut down that workers actually wind up in new high-paying jobs in growing industries. There might be winners, but there surely are losers.

Eventually, one has to wonder how machine learning and artificial intelligence will affect many jobs in the communications business, beyond the simple matter of firms needing to reduce operating and capital costs that almost necessarily require job cuts.

How much of the complexity and difficulty of buying and using communication-related services will be made much easier as we apply AI to the process of creating, delivering and selling services?

source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

How Much Will Artificial Intelligence Change Job Markets?

It remains difficult to predict just how much artificial intelligence will affect a growing range of jobs. In what might prove to be an optimistic outcome, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation will likely mean 16 percent of U.S. jobs will disappear by 2025, some estimate.

However, such technologies will also create new jobs, such as robotic engineers and technicians, data scientists, and content curators, amounting to a nine percent job increase to 2025.

Optimistically, humans will be left with more “person to person” jobs and “higher value” work.

On the other hand, such forecasts might prove, at least in some cases, to be too pessimistic. Many made the same predictions when automated teller machines  were widely adopted in the 1990s.

Since 2000, the number of bank tellers has increased two percent annually, however.

But banks also shed about 25 percent of people in the back office staff.

Forrester Research forecasts a net job loss of seven percent. Office, sales, and administrative support jobs will be "the most rapidly disrupted", says Forrester.

The number of white collar office workers, of which there are 89 million in the U.S., is forecast to decline by 12 percent between now and 2025.

source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Application-to-Person Messaging Grows

Global use of SMS as a channel for business communications will continue to grow over the next 10 years as more organisations adopt A2P (Application to Person) services and integrate them into their digital communications, according to a report released today by Telefónica.

Between 2014 and 2015, A2P text messaging volume grew 22 percent globally.

Though application to person texting will not prevent the decline of carrier text messaging revenue, it might ultimately represent a bigger share of what remains of the text messaging revenue contribution.

Some 8.3 trillion text messages are sent annually, Telefonica says.


source: Credence Research

How to Choose a Co-Location Services Provider

There is a simple why businesses of all sizes continue to invest more in data storage and computing. Few, if any, modern businesses can operate without information technology.

According to Cisco, data center workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019, for example.

When large businesses reach about 75 percent of computing and data storage capacity, they begin to evaluate alternatives for adding capability.

Most often, the choices involve most often involve investing in colocation capacity or buying cloud storage, instead of building new owned computing facilities, according to 451 Research.

Why Colocate?

Colocation makes sense when owned hardware is nearing end of useful life. In other cases, decisions to “lease, rather than build” are driven by staff resources inadequate to manage the upgrades.

Also, colocation and outsourcing make sense  when firms want to reduce costs or security and compliance chores.

That is why the colocation market is forecast to grow at more than 12 percent annual rates between 2015 and 2019, according to researchers at Technavio.

That is driving the $23 billion annual revenues colocation business, 45 percent of which is activity in North America.  

Even firms presently using colocation can add incremental resources affordably by using cloud computing in a hybrid mode, as an alternative to buying and managing additional hardware.

Firms can buy computing or storage infrastructure “as a service.” In an IaaS model, a third-party provider hosts hardware, software, servers, storage and other infrastructure components on behalf of its users.

In other cases firms might choose to use public cloud, private cloud or “hypervisors as a service” (use of virtual machines).

In a public cloud scenario, businesses essentially rent computing cycles or storage on servers operated on a shared basis.

In a private cloud environment, businesses buy dedicated use of resources not shared with other customers.

“Hypervisor” is a method of efficiently running any application on “virtual machines” without having physical copies of software loaded to support operating systems.

What Questions Should You Ask, When Buying Colocation Services?

Colocation always involves space and power. Any colocation facility should have room to accommodate not only your present requirements, but future growth. Also, stability and reliability of power systems are essential for your own equipment and the data center overall, to operate servers and keep them cool.

But technical support also is crucial. Look for a provider with a seasoned staff and proven credentials. The staff has to be able to diagnose and fix any potential issues that could compromise the performance and security of your equipment and data, quickly and cost effectively.

Storage-as-a-service

Every business requires a convenient way to store key data. Storage as a service allows businesses to save and retrieve business data reliably and affordably, without manual intervention by company staff.

Using a SaaS service, a customer can specify what data must be stored, how often it should be saved and how fast it can be retrieved in the event of any data loss by primary systems.

Service level agreements can help assure that data is securely backed up and quickly restored if necessary.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is a service that maintains, manages and backs up key business data remotely, while available to users over a network  that typically is the Internet.

As with all other cloud services, businesses can buy public, private or hybrid service. Generally, public cloud storage is best for unstructured data. Private cloud arguably is more appropriate when businesses need more customization and control. Hybrid cloud might be best when a business wants access to actively used and structured data in a private cloud, while archival data can be kept in a public cloud.

Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service

DRaaS enables the full replication and backup of all business data and applications. It allows an organization that has experienced major or total failure of primary systems to continue with daily business processes while the primary system undergoes repair.

DRaaS also allows these applications to run on virtual machines (VM) at any time, even without a real disaster. That is useful if a business wants a “sandbox” to prototype or test major new applications without exposing or interfering with  primary systems

Direct connect to cloud service providers

Your data center connections to other partners must be reliable, safe, and fast. Dedicated connections are faster and feature less latency than Internet connections. That is important for important performance-sensitive applications such as video or voice communications and “virtual desktop” apps.

Direction connections minimize your disaster recovery response times, and allow large data transfers.

Backups

Backup as a service provides an automated and managed way to preserve key business data, Cloud backup, also known as online backup, is a service that automatically, on a fixed schedule, collects, compresses, encrypts and transfers data to a remote storage location.

Hypervisors-as-a-Service

A hypervisor, also called a virtual machine manager, is a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Each operating system appears to have the host's processor, memory, and other resources all to itself.

Hypervisor as a service allows a business to buy that functionality without having to manage the process, maintain and update the virtual machines.

Every colocation service begins with space and power, but companies need to future-proof their decisions.

A colocation provider should have the technical and human ecosystems to provide direct access and cross-connects to a number of managed services providers and potential customers, while

Supporting and monitoring a business information technology environment 24x7x365, all in one facility.

Is Special Access Market Competitive, or Not?

According to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the total market for U.S. special access services is roughly $40 billion annually. The FCC believes the market is insufficiently competitive.

But observers note that the FCC itself reported U.S. telcos had 92 percent market share in special access in 1980. Telco share had dropped to 39 percent in 2013. In that year, TDM-based services represented $25 billion of the total market, while incumbent telcos accounted for about $16 billion of the TDM market, according to the FCC’s own data.

In some markets, 39 percent might well represent “dominance.” Whether that is the case in the special access market is the issue.

With the caveat that usage or bandwidth is not the same thing as revenue, Ethernet access provided by a wide range of competitors now represents market growth, while the legacy T1 and DS3 market declines.  

In fact, cable TV companies are big suppliers of Ethernet access and other access services to business buyers.

AT&T has argued that “facilities-based competitors are serving 95 percent of all MSA census blocks (on average, about one seventh of a square mile in an MSA) nationally where there is demand for special access services, and, second, that 99 percent of all business establishments are in those census blocks.”

For the first time ever, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission also is seeking to extend some special access obligations to cable TV networks for the first time.

And some argue that it is impossible to fully do a data-driven analysis because the FCC is not releasing the full results of its earlier survey of facilities, an exercise intended to provide some rationale for assessing the existence of facilities-based competition.

Some might find the emphasis on extending regulation to a declining service curious. AT&T’s access lines have declined by almost 65 percent since 2009.

A Historic Shift from Scarcity to Abundance has Been Underway for At Least 2 Decades

Though it perhaps is surprising, very little direct discussion of the role of scarcity in the telecommunications business happens these days. That is manifestly not because people are unaware of its importance.

Contestants are very much aware of the role “scarcity” plays in the access business. In fact, attempts to maintain scarcity are a foundational part of strategy for some contestants, while efforts to end scarcity and create abundance likewise underpin the strategies undertaken by attackers.

The reasons are drop-dead simple: scarcity creates higher profit margins and higher revenue, as is true in any market. Abundance lowers profit margins and gross revenue, in any market.

Some rightly would argue that a ubiquitous access network (mobile, cable TV, fiber to home or copper to the home) is expensive, limited the number of providers that can exist in any market.

The point is that, with the advent of an era of abundance, the barriers are going to fall, and fall substantially.

So the possible “bad news” for some access providers is that the historic scarcity of resources in the access network is going to be replaced by abundance. The “good news” for app providers is that access capacity is going to be less and less a barrier to their business models.

To be clear, the end of the age of scarcity, and the start of the era of abundance, is coming, for the bandwidth portions of telecommunications business, and will force dramatic rethinking of business models.

As access services drive less revenue volume and produce lower profits, access providers will move into other parts of the Internet ecosystem, just as app providers are moving into the access and device portions of the ecosystem.

The trend is not actually so new. In fact, abundance has been approaching for decades, in part because of advances in use of spectrum, the impact of Moore’s Law and competition itself.

The implications could not be more profound. For more than a century, “scarcity” has been the fundamental reality of the industry and the business.

Networks were expensive, time-consuming and bandwidth limited.

In some ways, scarcity still drives the equity value of fixed and mobile networks. Fixed access networks are terribly expensive to build and operate, which is why there are so few of them in any market.

Advances are happening, but the “rule of a few” still holds, as what is scarce are enough customers to support the building and operation of a ubiquitous fixed access network in the face of two or more other providers.

But scarcity and abundance are starting to coexist. Moore’s Law helps. Better signal processing and antenna arrays help. Unlicensed spectrum and Wi-Fi also help. Optical fiber helps, even if some in the recent past have argued that scarcity and pricing power would return to the access business when optical fiber becomes ubiquitous.

Fixed wireless helps. Spectrum sharing helps as well.  

But much more is coming. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is moving to make  available an extraordinary amount of new spectrum--including seven gigaHertz (7 GHz)  worth of unlicensed spectrum, in the millimeter wave bands, and a total of 11 GHz, including 3.85 GHz of licensed spectrum, in a first wave.

Nor is that all. The Commission also adopted a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which seeks comment on  rules adding another 18 GHz of spectrum encompassing eight additional high-frequency bands, as well as spectrum sharing for the 37 GHz to 37.6 GHz band.

Keep in mind that the new allocations represent many times more spectrum than all other existing spectrum now available for mobile and wireless communications in the U.S. market. Just how much more depends on one’s assumptions about coding techniques and modulation.

But it is possible the new spectrum will represent an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude more communications spectrum than presently is available for mobile and wireless communications purposes.

Abundance will transform business models. Incumbents who built their businesses on scarcity will have to rework those models. App providers whose businesses are built on the assumption of abundance will flourish, at least potentially.