Creating productive APIs

Changing the focus from cost reduction to productivity and growth

In a world where automation is often perceived as a threat to jobs, we must shift our focus from cutting costs to enhancing productivity and growth. The path to this transformation lies in human-centric automation, which empowers individuals to be more creative and innovative.

While automation touches various aspects of our lives, its role in quality control, logistics, maintenance, and other areas has become increasingly crucial. This blog post will explore how robust APIs play a vital role in achieving this transformation and making work more productive and meaningful.

Embracing productivity over cost-cutting

Many companies have traditionally viewed automation to cut costs, often raising concerns about job losses.

However, to unlock the true potential of automation, we must shift our perspective. The focus should be on productivity and growth. It's easy to get fixated on metrics that are simple to measure, such as reducing expenses. But the real power of automation lies in eliminating the time-consuming and mentally taxing tasks that can be automated.

Consider how much time is wasted transferring data between software packages or repeatedly generating the same reports every month. The cost of errors, whether detected or not, introduced in these tasks is often overlooked. By concentrating solely on replacing people to cut costs, we miss the opportunity to experience growth by freeing individuals to be more creative and innovative.

Human-centric automation in action

To understand the concept of human-centric automation, let's explore a few examples:

1. Snoozing Emails

One of the simplest yet highly effective examples of automation is the ability to snooze emails. This feature allows individuals to defer dealing with emails, with the reminder to revisit them later. It's a small change but significantly reduces cognitive load, allowing people to focus on more meaningful tasks.

2. Integration of Mastercam and CoroPlus from Sandvik Coromant

This integration offers a seamless way to import tools directly into Mastercam from CoroPlus. Data is pulled directly into Mastercam without the risk of error-prone manual entry, making the process more efficient and reliable.

3. Alexa-enabled smart light switches

At home, the automation extends to smart devices like Alexa, which can intelligently control external lights based on the time of day. For instance, the lights automatically come on 10 minutes before sunset and turn off at 11:30 pm. This example showcases the intersection of technology and everyday life, illustrating how automation can enhance our daily routines.

The impact of AI in automation

The recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been nothing short of remarkable.

AI has significantly expanded the scope of work that can be automated. However, it's important to recognize that AI tools primarily generate text or images based on existing data, rather than creating something entirely new.

The essence of creativity and innovation still originates from human minds. This underscores the significance of focusing on tasks that only people can perform, allowing them the space to innovate and contribute uniquely to businesses.

The role of software developers in enabling automation

To enable human-centric automation and ensure that automation remains a catalyst for productivity and growth, software developers play a pivotal role. The key to achieving this lies in the development of robust Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for quality control, logistics, maintenance, and other areas.

The significance of robust APIs

What can software developers do to enable automation of non-innovative tasks? First, it’s all about APIs.

Developers need to ensure that everything they build is fully, programmatically automatable. It's impossible to predict how customers will use their products or what other products they may want to connect. By maintaining a focus on building components with a robust API, developers future-proof their software against evolving automation needs. This approach not only benefits external customers but also enhances internal processes by making it easier to build new features on top of a strong API foundation.

Addressing worker concerns about automation

As the landscape of automation evolves, workers often express valid concerns about the potential displacement of jobs. Acknowledging these concerns is essential, as job displacement is a real issue. However, it's equally important to provide guidance and a path forward. Here are a few proposals on how to address the concerns that many workers have in terms of automation taking their jobs:

Validating concerns

First and foremost, it's essential to validate the concerns of workers. Job displacement does happen, and it's a genuine concern.

The importance of skill enhancement

To address these concerns, workers should focus on understanding what automation can do today and what it's likely to achieve in the near future. There will always be skills that computers, even with AI, aren't adept at. It's crucial to identify and invest in improving these skills. In any industry, there are roles and tasks that are uniquely human and irreplaceable.

Leveraging automation for productivity

At the same time, it's critical to learn how to use automation effectively to enhance individual productivity. Automation should be seen as a tool that complements human capabilities, rather than a threat to job security.

Overcoming concerns and technical challenges

APIs are being used for quality control, logistics, maintenance, and other areas.

Advocating for making a product "fully automatable" can raise concerns and technical roadblocks. Let's address these challenges:

Concerns about costs and overhead

The first concern often relates to the initial cost of developing an API and automation strategy. There's also an ongoing cost associated with ensuring that new features have a robust API. While these expenses exist, the benefits significantly outweigh the costs.

Robust automation allows customers to adapt products to their workflows and environments easily, providing a tailored experience. Internally, it simplifies code reuse, streamlining the development of new features.

Fear of making the product easily replaceable

Some individuals may fear that by providing a high degree of automatability, they are making their product more easily replaceable. However, this concern is unwarranted. Robust automation enhances the value of the product and makes it less likely to be substituted by competitors.

Technical challenges

Technical roadblocks can vary depending on whether the application has been around for a while or is a new product. For well-established applications, the challenge lies in adapting a large volume of existing code to be automatable. A clean approach that aligns with the existing codebase must be identified, along with a strategy for converting existing code in a clean and safe manner.

In contrast, new products face the challenge of not having an existing user base to understand how customers might want to automate the product. Flexibility and adaptability must be designed into the product from the outset to accommodate the evolving needs of users.

APIs and designing in a flexible way

In a world where automation is going to become the future, the focus should no longer be solely on cost reduction. But embracing automation for productivity and growth is the key to unlocking human potential and creativity.

From snoozing emails to seamlessly integrated software and smart home devices, human-centric automation is enhancing our lives in ways we couldn't have imagined.

The impact of AI on automation is significant, but it's essential to remember that true creativity and innovation continue to originate from human minds. Software developers play a crucial role in this transformation by building robust APIs that enable automation, both externally and internally.

For workers concerned about job displacement, the path forward lies in validating their concerns, enhancing their skills, and leveraging automation as a tool to boost productivity. Concerns about costs, making products replaceable, and technical challenges are surmountable obstacles on the journey towards fully automatable products.

To further explore this topic you might like to read a customer story how Mastercam created productive APIs that helped to identify repetitive parts and was able to streamline and automate these processes. The API technology continued to reduce programming time. While, also providing Multiaxis machining permits for the cutting of complex miters and parts.