Need Results and analysis for my Theory topic

Proposed Capstone Schedule …………………………………………………………………..14

Many of tech companies and organization are putting into use the AI technologies that are made up of the robots, augmented reality and even the virtual assistants. Recently there was a report that was undertaken by Accenture in 12 nations and it showed that AI that is able to sense the environment has the ability to know what is happening to lead to the taking of an action. All these would, later on, lead to the rise in the levels of productivity to sales of 40% in the year 2035.The report goes on to show that once AI is well utilized, there will be chances of economic growth by American multinational companies from a 2.6% to 4.6% in the same period(Hunt,2009). This is why it is important for the scholarly community to research this topic at this time. My research is specific to AI in American corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook only. There are not many companies out there capable of AI level research. I am trying to measure the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) that measures the growth of economy that comes from technology and innovation changes. With this research, I would like to answer the question “Is AI replacing human work force or is it adding more productivity by assisting”. There is less knowledge out there about AI but it is still researchable. This research would give confidence to the future generations especially after the recent Facebook AI incident where the bot created its own language to communicate with other bots.

A group of robots runs a new McDonald’s store in Phoenix Arizona totally. The company made this move after seeing a decline in sales for the first time in 9 years. The store has opened on July 4, after the robot models have remodeled the store. These robots are supposed to work 50 times more efficient than human workforce is. This would help McDonald’s to make a comeback with their share price increasing back to 105$/share.

McDonald’s has announced that it would roll out digital self-order kiosks and table service in all of its 14,000 US stores which will eliminate the need for human labor and also to make the process more efficient to increase sales and profits. This led a crowd of 1500 protestors to hold a rally at McDonald’s corporate campus.

Currently each McDonald’s store needs a minimum of six employees per store to run the business. However, McDonald’s response to changing business environment with customers and competitors evolving preferences with Artificial Intelligence is affecting their work force. The reality in the future is to run a store totally on robots using AI.

The purpose of this report is to explain how the move of the company into hiring robots is putting human work force at the risk of job loss. This will include replacing entry-level jobs like cashier all the way to flipping burgers in the kitchen. To my knowledge, so study has not yet quantified how recent AI technologies are going to affect future employment.

The questions this proposal will investigate through this paper are as follows:

RQ1: Is the human workforce replaceable by a robot with AI?

RQ2: What is the productivity of a machine compared to a human?

RQ3: How is automation using AI currently affecting the human work force of McDonald’s?

The objectives I am trying to achieve with this paper are as follows:

RO1: Based on empirical studies of data from different news and statistical sources, I would like to make a statement about the impact Artificial Intelligence is creating on the human work force.

In the Theoretical framework, I designed the variables are Capital, Labor, Artificial Intelligence and Total Factor Productivity. In a traditional model, there are only 3 variables Employee Productivity is a dependent variable, which contribute to the growth of productivity, but in my framework a new variable called AI would be added and it is an independent variable now-a-days which can affect the growth of a company both positively and negatively.

Based on the theoretical framework designed, it is hypothesized that even though McDonald’s have increased their sales and profits, by using robots with AI technologies in their restaurant it can negatively affect the total factor productivity since it also includes human labor. The most frequently cited prediction of John Maynard Keynes “due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor” (Keynes, 1933, p. 3) is a huge motivation for my research.

In the last decade, many jobs like telephone operators, cashiers have been replaced by AI technologies and it is predicted that increase of AI controlled equipment is a huge factor in the increase of jobless growth in human labor. Recent developments in Machine learning technologies like Data Mining, Machine Vision and Machine Reality technologies like Augmented Reality add additional dimension of susceptibility to jobs of the future.

The present study will try to answer the impact of AI technologies on the occupation composition of labor market. With the availability of huge amounts of data, a wide range of non-routine tasks are being automated or being handled by Artificial Intelligence bots.

Total Factor Productivity is the growth that comes from Technological advances and innovations.

This paper will be done in an ethical manner. Human subjects are not involved for my study. This study also did not include any information that is private or confidential.

The delimitations of my research are particular to Artificial Intelligence technologies like facial recognition, machine learning and natural language processing in the company McDonald’s in the demography of United States.

For a study this huge, I have a few constraints that should be considered.

1. Time

2. Non-availability of historic studies/ journals for reference.

For my study, I will be considering AI to be only computational devices and system made to act in a manner that can be deemed intelligent. Many of the current research have explained positives of AI on work, education, healthcare and decision-making. Nevertheless, my study will concentrate on concerns of Artificial Intelligence like Loss of Control, AI displacing human jobs. According to article by Ethan Fast (2016) analysis conducted contained articles published by New York Times from January 1986 to May 2016 (p. 964) includes more than 3 million articles, it was concluded that Artificial intelligence “has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways.”

According to article by Matthew Hutson (2017) which is a recent article summarizing the work of a AI teaching company Microwork stated that even though AI is advancing at a great pace it still needs humans to teach the system the dataset which can be created only by humans. His statement is “No matter what the profession we will work with alongside AI in our everyday lives”. None of the above literature talks about the concern of AI impacting work force.

My study will determine if the progress of AI will have a negative impact on employee productivity and in turn US economy by answering the below questions: These questions below might help us understand how impact of AI will make or break the employee productivity across different companies:

The researchable heading that must be included for this thesis topic are the range of AI impact over US Economy in the future, McDonalds initiative of making totally automated store, laying off low paying jobs of Food preparation and serving workers, AI helps keeping costs down and Production high.

I have reviewed some methodologies that are mostly quantitative where it was surveys conducted citywide which are purely statistical and data collected through interviews and surveys and all of these have been talking about how AI can perform operation with the press of a button and can do it better than human work force. However, these methodologies are missing out explaining how the human workforce is negatively affected due to this growth of AI technologies and how AI machines are overtaking the low paying jobs. My study would concentrate and try to explain this side of the coin.

The theories currently used in most of the research papers base on an assumption that AI technologies can increase productivity by reducing costs of labor and efficiency of Production. Even though this assumption is valid, it lacks human context. AI automation might increase the economy of a company, but at the cost of human workforce losing their work. Since this aspect of the above assumption is not studied, I will like to make an assumption that even though AI technologies increase the overall profits of a company, it also decreases in the headcount of employees and loss of human work force.

Constructing a framework for my topic is quite hard, since it is new and still evolving enormously, nevertheless my entire study is anchored to the point that employee productivity in a company is in declining state due to growth of AI implementation in McDonalds. The key variables in my research will be Total Factor productivity, Employee morale, Job security. Until today a company’s growth is measured based on production and employees, now this new variable called AI is added. In my literature review, I have studied only the benefits of AI in multiple areas of different companies; nobody has done enough research about the negative effects of automation using AI technologies. There are only a few articles written by certain individuals who have identified this aspect. My thesis will include some of the ideas presented by these individuals as well.

This is an important factor, since most of the companies in the US, which harness the power of AI for user information management and advertising, are all billion-dollar companies on the stock exchange and can change the phase of economy, which in fact drives the number of jobs created. After reviewing the article Purdy (2016) on how the advance of AI is leading us to rethink fundamental economic relationships and how value is created. (p. 5)

Now-a-days consumers use AI for simple tasks such as creating alarms, read and reply messages on their compatible mobile devices. However, in the near future AI might be used to replace human work force itself. According to Journal of Biomedical Informatics (vol. 46, Is. 5, 2013, p765-773) many tasks are accomplished by a capable AI system and it can do it more efficiently and quickly using Natural Language processing than human workforce.

This measure is an important factor, which decide the overall productivity of a company or a system based on usage or technology and innovation. This is a volatile factor since it can rocket high or plummet down in abyss based on the technology or the innovations created. The only regions, which still maintain an acceptable TFP score, are Middle East and North Africa according to Purdy (2016).

Private Industry Monarchy

Most AI systems that are common for general consumers are personal assistants on mobile devices and major tech companies created all these systems, but it is not available to everyone. The technology has not reached to the level total autonomy for it to be adapted countrywide or across the government sector. A set of multimillion-dollar private corporates currently own the technology that can change the phase of workforce and economy in the future. Google is currently the leading tech company, which has a monarchy in the private industry.

Past Technological Advances to predict future

During the last decade, the technological innovations and new technologies has grown leaps and bounds, which became large drivers of growth in economy as well as in labor force. These advances have paved a structure where future technologies are built upon. Lot of these companies use robots and AI systems for their everyday tasks. Therefore, the factors, which would affect the technological advances in the future and how it would increase or decrease the employee productivity, is a question to answer.

In order to look at the question on Artificial Intelligence and Employee Productivity in McDonald’s a pragmatic worldview need to be followed. Since the organization- McDonald’s is comprised of people from different categories and with different education level, the open method will allow me to conduct an exhaustive research without any restriction t any point of the research. Pragmatism will allow us to use all the methods of data collection including the use of case studies. The two transcendent methodologies for studying the communication of AI, administration, and associations are contextual analyses (both single and various) and experimental investigations. The greater part of the case examines are about effective applications; there is a lack of cases about disappointments which might be considerably more vital to break down in respect to victories (Creswell, 2013).  Cases give both reasonable bits of knowledge and a reason for creating hypotheses to be in the end tried by experimental strategies

Following the research worldview to complete this research this study will employ mixed method approach. In this method, I will use both the quantitative and qualitative research design to find a mathematical and statistical conclusion. In a quantitative research design, researchers seek to establish a rationale-and-outcomes relationship by way of forming organizations of members/objects. The unbiased variable is a gift or absent or reward at a few levels- after which making a choice on whether the groups differ within the stylish variable (Creswell, 2013) whereas quantitative research design is where data will be collected using closed ended questions and observations. This research, therefore, will assess the impacts of AI and employee productivity in McDonalds.

In order to explore how Artificial intelligence will affect the employee productivity at McDonald’s and having employed mixed research method then the strategy to be used will be sequential research strategy.  In this strategy, a qualitative data collection will be done then an analysis carried out (Mertens, 2014).   Thereafter a quantitative data collection will be carried out and an analysis given. In the quantitative research, records of the employee in the organization are analyzed and data recorded then after that it open ended question and interviews will be conducted and the data collected will be analyzed.

In order to get the proper relationship between AI and employee productivity at Macdonald data will be collected using mixed methods. Firstly, data will be collected using an open-ended questionnaire that will be given to the employee as well as the management.  In addition to the open-ended question, we will also look at the employee performance in the previous financial years before the introduction of AI and compare it to the employee productivity after AI. All this information will then be analyzed and a conclusion made on the matter.

After collected data, using the mixed method then a mixed method of analysis will be employed to study the data collected. The data collected using quantitative method will be analyzed using descriptive and inferential analysis and then reported in analysis form. In descriptive analysis, descriptive coefficients that summarize a given data set, which can be either a representation of the entire population or a sample of it (Mertens, 2014).   The data collected using qualitative analysis will be analyzed using 3-level coding where all the data from the questionnaire from both the employees and the managers are coded.    

The research is to be conducted in all the branches of McDonalds in New York City USA. Since USA has some of the largest outlets as well as most of the outlets where the AI has been introduced it will be necessary to collect data in most of the branches. New York has some of the outlets that are frequently visited therefore it will give a good representation of the outlets. These populations will give a proper representation of the general McDonald’s outlets. The populace is the whole group of events, people, objects that have the observable characteristic that is common.

Bobrow, D. (2005). Artificial intelligence in perspective. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.