Medium-sized firms expect automation to make them more competitive

The UK lags behind in automation adoption, but growth is forecast

Process automation will help mid-sized firms compete with larger rivals - or so one in five of them believe.

21 per cent of medium-sized UK businesses told international payments firm Centtrip that automation will make them more competitive against larger firms. A higher proportion expect such technologies to save them significant amounts of time (42 per cent) and money (33 per cent).

Automation involves offloading simple, repetitive but time-consuming tasks to machines, and is being adopted across the IT industry. Although there have been recent warnings that the UK lags behind in adoption, Centtrip's study shows that three quarters of mid-sized businesses already use it in at least one area of business, and almost a quarter (24 per cent) employ it across the whole company.

It is still large firms that stand to gain the most out of automation at this point, however, with 32 per cent of them utilising automation throughout their business.

Much has been written about automation's effect on the labour market, both for and against. Even experts disagree on where the economy will end up: the Bank of England has called it "The dark side of technological revolutions", but also said it will only change jobs, rather than replace them.

In September, the World Economic Forum announced that automation will displace 75 million jobs, but create as many as 133 million that will be ‘more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms'.

About a quarter (23 per cent) of the medium and large businesses that Centtrip talked to said that they were likely to make people redundant as they adopt automation, although that is also like to mean taking on new staff with the skills to administer automated processes.