As CEOs the world over realise the importance of investments in automation that can remove some risk of dependence on humans and adapt without intervention to demand fluctuations in such uncertain times, they should automate but with empathy, says a new report. In the long run, the march of automation across the enterprise is inexorable. While this trend is consistent with earlier recessions and recoveries, modern intelligent automation technologies increasingly encroach on cognitive areas of human labour and interaction. Many of these, such as machine learning, are "fuzzy" and can inherit biases in training data or challenge the superiority of humans in the human-machine collaboration equation, according to the report titled "The COVID-19 Crisis Will Accelerate Enterprise Automation Plans". "Workers and leaders will require new skills, behaviours and mindsets. The specter of a jobless recovery is real, and the human impact of the crisis on the workforce will continue into recovery," said Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst with Forrester.

How AI and data science are helping to understand and tackle the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our daily lives in ways we could not have imagined just over a month ago. For many of us, our lives now happen within four walls. Around the world, restaurants, shops and theatres have been closed. Millions of people are in an increasingly precarious financial situation.