ROBOTS WILL FOR SURE TAKE OVER MORE “HUMAN” JOBS IN 2022
I n October, U.S. employers posted 11 million job openings (Davidson, 2021). Job openings have exceeded 10 million for five consecutive months already. Meanwhile, there were only 7.4 million unemployed Americans in October, equivalent to 1.5 available jobs for every unemployed person. The leisure and hospitality sector alone added an additional 251,000 openings. Vacant positions in leisure and hospitality have reached 1.8 million. Then, what can hospitality businesses do to deal with the labor shortage issue? Hotels, restaurants, and foodservice businesses are redesigning jobs with more automatic service components. Hotels want customers to skip the front desk. Guests can use mobile apps to do almost everything for a hotel stay, from making/updating a reservation, checking in, opening the guest room, making service requests, to checking out. COMPANIES FOUND SOLUTIONS THROUGH AUTOMATIC SERVICES BY: LINCHI KWOK, PH.D.
Restaurants and foodservice businesses went steps further. Some have introduced new store designs to embrace robotic service. Forget about self-ordering apps or kiosks. Restaurants are now using burger-flipping robots, delivery robots, and robotic fry or stir-fry stations. Technology also allows more foodservice workers to work remotely. Employees at an Arizona Chick-fil-A Restaurant can take drive-thru orders while they are sitting at home (Matyszczyk, 2021). Imagine the AI-empowered automatic service becoming mature. Will restaurants still need a real human to take customer orders? Furthermore, can we expect more AI-empowered avatars and robots to do more jobs for human beings?
WORKERS MUST GET READY TOWORKWITH ROBOTS
The robotic trend in service operations will continue, meaning robots will take over more service jobs that are still performed by real humans today. Human-robot interactions will become an essential part of the future servicescape and workplace. n
REFERENCES Davidson, P. (2021, December 8). Job openings hover near all-time highs as Great Resignation shows little sign of easing. USA Today. Retrieved on December 16, 2021, via usatoday.com/story/money/2021/12/08/labor-market-job-openings-great-resignation/6425215001/ Matyszczyk, C. (2021, December 18). A controversial Chick-fil-A video reveals so much about the future work. ZDNet. Retrieved on December 18, 2021, via zdnet.com/google-amp/article/a-controversial-chick-fil-a-video-reveals-so-much-about-the-future-of-work
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