Robots have long been a source of anxiety for humans. When not terrorizing us as theme park hosts or returning from the future to alter our timelines, they have embodied all our worst fears of work automation and job displacement. The COVID-19 crisis has seen the rapid adoption of robotics in a wide array of industries, from healthcare to logistics, and in doing so, given us a preview of what a mechanized world of a trillion, interconnected bots might be like. It is easy to assume this will be a zero-sum game: robots will replace humans like for like. The reality is more complex and potentially more challenging if we don’t act now to transform the way we think about work.

The 2020 pandemic thrust upon us the new reality of working from home. While for more traditional corporations, remote work came as a shock, for other startups and software companies, it was nothing new. They were designed from the outset to be location independent, to access a global pool of talent, and avoid the overhead of a corporate headquarters. So, when normalcy returns, will we see the resurgence of the office or something entirely different: the distributed organization?

What happens when your five-year plan for digital transformation becomes just an emergency strategy for immediate survival? True, the current COVID-19 crisis is accelerating the shift to a digital, automated, contactless future. But that raises a more complex question: what does disruption now mean in a world in which all the surviving companies are already digital?

I was fortunate enough to find myself in Japan in late March, just in time for the iconic sakura, or cherry blossom, season. Pink clouds of flowers transformed the streets of Tokyo, all the more beautiful for their transience; the blooms often last for merely a week before they fall like pastel snow. As a guest of Mina Sekiguchi and KPMG’s energy advisory team, I had the chance to reflect on another kind of transformation that has become a priority for many Japanese leaders: how do you reinvent traditional organizations for the algorithmic age?

'What do you mean we need to be a software company?' asked Lukas Braunschweiler, CEO of Sonova, one of the world's leading manufacturers of high-tech hearing devices. I had just finished giving a talk to their senior leadership team at the gorgeous lakeside town of Stäfa, near Zurich. 'We already have lots of software engineers. Are you saying that we need more?' It was a fair question, and one I had spent much of the prior week thinking about, in a few unusual places. How many software engineers do you need to transform a company?