Through a quick Google search, it’s not hard to locate scare pieces about how automated robots, machines and computers are going to displace the workforce in coming years. However, talk to some folks working closely with companies making the digital transformation, and you’ll quickly get a glimpse of the brighter side of this story: Human employees will be “displaced” to a space where they can use their talents to think and create on a brand new level.

“One of the biggest things we’re doing today is learning to understand and automate human tasks,” said Goutham Belliappa, Big Data Integration and Analytics practice leader at Capgemini.

“One of the biggest things we see in supply chain companies, for example, is they don’t have enough planners,” he told Peter Burris (@plburris) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during BigDataNYC.

Filling these roles with the money saved through automation opens a vista to advancement, Belliappa explained. “So we’re taking the top five percent of planners, automating what everyone else does and letting them handle exceptions,” he said. This enables “companies to scale in areas where they could never scale because they never had enough people to do it.”

The soft sell

Belliappa noted that even companies that have traditionally been synonymous with hard assets — like GE — are looking to get into software and services, because that is where differentiation is moving.

“The hard assets are getting commoditized. The value comes from what you can build on top of the assets, which is your IP,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE