Is a robot better than you at business writing?

The fear that machines and robots would one day take our jobs has been around since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Technology is developing at astounding rates of efficiency, with machinery, innovation and devices making complex tasks simpler every day. It is therefore unsurprising that productivity-obsessed employers are considering robots in all manner of roles traditionally occupied by human workers.

In fact, robots have gone beyond the automated factory line and computer-based software and have begun to infiltrate the realm of authorship.

Global news publisher Associated Press recently announced plans to use computer programs to write business news stories and they aren’t the first to adopt this trend, either. The Los Angeles Times has been using bots to create content related to earthquake and homicide reports for some time now. Additionally, around 2.7 million or 8.5 per cent of Wikipedia articles were written by a machine, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While this may be a troubling trend for any human writer, there are ways to protect your job from the metallic grasp of robots. First, you may want to invest in business writing training to ensure your grammar, formatting and spelling are on par with the analytical minds of machinery.

Additionally, you should embrace the differences that make human writers unique to their robotic counterparts. For instance, while software, bots and machinery can inject a variety of facts and statistics into their content, they rely primarily on information already available online.

On the other hand, a human writer is able to go out into the world, gathering experiences and first-hand knowledge that robots could only dream about – if they ever actually slept.

For this reason, try to inject a little personality into your business writing. Unless you’re creating a document designed to carry only the facts – in which case, it may be time to invest in a new kind of technology.