The Path To Empathetic Software Automation

by Adrian Bridgwater, Forbes Senior Contributor
I track enterprise software application development & data management.

Engineers engineer, in all genres. It's what they live for. Electronics engineers live to build, solder and connect wires, junctions and chunks of metal; equally then - software engineers love to build, solder and connect virtualized abstracted elements of functionality as they 'cut' code and commit it to projects in order to create applications and services.

As our use of software automation grows, we need to recognize that developers do like to build from scratch at a foundational level, but (as we know) they're not stupid and they will take the path of least resistance like anybody faced with an easier route to an end goal. This reality means we need to use automation in all its forms, but we also need to use it right.

What is good automation?

There is not necessarily any definition of 'good' automation as opposed to bad, but we can generally say that best practices in this space always lead to the highest return on investment.

Ever since automation evolved past its traditional hardware uses (and we mean everything from the first advances in mechanization during the second industrial revolution all the through to the modern age of factory robots), it has been used by forward-thinking businesses to aid every aspect of digital development from multi-cloud adoption and migration and onwards to integration, to backup, security and wider systems management.

"Now that ChatGPT and Google Bard have exploded onto the scene, even more businesses are looking to upscale their automation infrastructure. However, before businesses dive headfirst into fully automating their architecture, it's important for them to pause and consider the best way to do so. The secret to success is to automate right, not automate right now," explains Tanner Bechtel, director of automation at World Wide Technology, a company known for its enterprise software technologies that make wide use of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

What is empathetic automation?

Bechtel founded and currently leads his firm's emerging technology division focused on application-centric AI IT operations (AIOPS) and also overseas WWT's strategy for automation & orchestration. He says he is on AI/ML-based empathetic technology design in human/technology innovation.