Imagine a bot on your work computer that tracks your every click and keystroke, helping determine which of your tasks could be handled by one of its robot brethren.
Call it automating automation. It's McKinsey & Co.'s entry into robotic process automation, which is spreading "robots" from the factory floor to the office cubicle as advancing technologies make it easier and more economically feasible for software to perform cognitive tasks now done by humans.
It's transforming office work across the world, including in the Philippines' offshoring business processing centers, which employ more than a million people and generate annual revenue equal to about 7.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. It could cost a lot of people their jobs, but as McKinsey noted in a report earlier this year, it could also help their companies stay competitive and even capture a bigger market share.