Lights Out Office: part 1
In manufacturing, a lights out factory runs fully autonomously with nobody in the building. Apply that same idea to back office work and you get the lights out office. This is part 1.
Key takeaways
- A lights out office is not an office with the lights off, and not one where people work in night vision goggles. It is a fully autonomous office that runs unsupervised and unmanned for a prolonged period.
- The term is borrowed from manufacturing. A lights out factory runs and operates without human intervention, production lines and maintenance included.
- Applied to business it means not having an office at all, with the back office work done by AI agents.
- A lot of back office work is already repeatable and automatable, and those efficiency gains will land in the next couple of years.
Transcript
Hey guys, what a lovely day. It’s getting chilly at night time here in Kitchener, down to 8 degrees, but the daytime is still pretty lovely. We get some warmth, we get some sun.
So this weather always inspires you to talk about AI agents, right? What else can we talk about? It’s always AI agents, it’s always the future. You always want to be looking into the future, be prepared, and try to leverage it as much as possible.
So the topic that I wanted us to touch is the lights out office. What is a lights out office? It’s not an office without any lighting, and it’s not an office with employees working with the night vision equipment. No, definitely not. As you could guess, it’s an idea of a fully autonomous office that can run unsupervised and unmanned for some prolonged period of time. So it’s basically an idea of not having an office at all, and all the back office work to be done by AI agents.
The term is coming from manufacturing. So there is this idea of lights out factory. What is lights out factory? Lights out factory is a fully autonomous factory that can run and operate without human intervention for some period of time. So all the production lines, all the maintenance around it is all fully automated.
So the same idea, we take the same idea and try to apply to the back office work. No one could probably argue today that a lot of back office work is repeatable, automatable, and there are a lot of efficiency gains that are, can be, and will be implemented in the next couple of years. And the ideal is actually to have this lights out office, that is fully automated office that can run, again, without human intervention for some period of time.
Sources and further reading
- Lights out (manufacturing) defines the original term: fully automating production “without requiring any human labour presence on-site”, which is the factory idea this post carries over to back office work.
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