McKinsey Consulting: Nearly 60% of manufacturing jobs could be automated over next decade

While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail, according to global consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

“Automation, now going beyond routine manufacturing activities, has the potential, as least with regard to its technical feasibility, to transform sectors such as healthcare and finance, which involve a substantial share of knowledge work,” McKinsey said in an article in the firm’s quarterly newsletter.

According to McKinsey, these conclusions rest on a detailed analysis of 2,000-plus work activities for more than 800 occupations. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*Net, the report quantified the amount of time spent on the activities across the U.S. economy and the technical feasibility of automating each of them.

The full results, forthcoming in early 2017, will include several other countries, but McKinsey said some of the findings were released late last year and the firm is now reporting additional interim results.

“Last year, we showed that currently demonstrated technologies could automate 45% of the activities people are paid to perform and that about 60% of all occupations could see 30% or more of their constituent activities automated, again with technologies available today,” said McKinley researcher Michael Chui.

According to Chui, McKinsey’s study examines the technical feasibility, using existing technologies, of automating three groups of occupational activities: those that are highly susceptible, less susceptible, and least susceptible to automation.

“Within each category, we discuss the sectors and occupations where robots and other machines are most – and least – likely to serve as substitutes in activities humans currently perform. Toward the end of this article, we discuss how evolving technologies, such as natural-language generation, could change the outlook, as well as some implications for senior executives who lead increasingly automated enterprises,” Chui said.

In manufacturing, for example, performing physical activities or operating machinery in a predictable environment represents one-third of the workers’ overall time. The activities range from packaging products to loading materials on production equipment to welding to maintaining equipment. Because of the prevalence of such predictable physical work, some 59% of all manufacturing activities could be automated, given technical considerations. The overall technical feasibility, however, masks considerable variance.

Within manufacturing, 90% of what welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers do, for example, has the technical potential for automation, but for customer-service representatives that feasibility is below 30%. The potential varies among companies as well. Input from manufacturers reveals a wide range of adoption levels – from companies with inconsistent or little use of automation all the way to quite sophisticated users.