It’s not clear to me why the regulatory and permitting hurdles would be lower for the established company that starts using teleoperation than for a new company doing the same thing. Maybe the new company gets slightly faster scrutiny if they start doing illegal stuff? But if an established company’s permit filing rates go down without a clear explanation or they start replacing licensed labor with teleoperated labor on permitted projects, that’s still going to be noticed quickly.
That said, I do agree that consumer reputation effects mean that the biggest impacts happen when these practices become widespread across established companies. I don’t think that necessarily takes super long though; if there’s efficiency to be had, then the current wave of private equity buyouts of established businesses in the trades will simply accelerate. Funds will be able to buy existing companies at a premium to their current fundamentals, change the existing firms’ business practices to crank up their profits, and either keep the resulting revenue stream or flip the business for a quick profit.
Sorry, my distinction was unclear. The hurdle would be lower for an org with an internal team of teleoperators as opposed to a new business that would need to find more than one client for their teleoperations services. It’s basically a client relationship issue that would be more viable internal to a large company.
In re: reputation, I think you’re vastly overestimating the speed of capital optimization. The process you describe will take 5 − 10 years. This is especially true here because either:
The task that could be teleoperated (inspection, electricians) is not a major cost center for the business, so there’s low alpha in solving its optimization OR
The task that could be teleoperated is the business itself, at which point you hit all the PR problems A lot of these relationships would have to be B2C or B2B for services and that ultimately is still PR for humans.
There’s then this binomial distribution that makes this harder than it seems.
It’s not clear to me why the regulatory and permitting hurdles would be lower for the established company that starts using teleoperation than for a new company doing the same thing. Maybe the new company gets slightly faster scrutiny if they start doing illegal stuff? But if an established company’s permit filing rates go down without a clear explanation or they start replacing licensed labor with teleoperated labor on permitted projects, that’s still going to be noticed quickly.
That said, I do agree that consumer reputation effects mean that the biggest impacts happen when these practices become widespread across established companies. I don’t think that necessarily takes super long though; if there’s efficiency to be had, then the current wave of private equity buyouts of established businesses in the trades will simply accelerate. Funds will be able to buy existing companies at a premium to their current fundamentals, change the existing firms’ business practices to crank up their profits, and either keep the resulting revenue stream or flip the business for a quick profit.
Sorry, my distinction was unclear. The hurdle would be lower for an org with an internal team of teleoperators as opposed to a new business that would need to find more than one client for their teleoperations services. It’s basically a client relationship issue that would be more viable internal to a large company.
In re: reputation, I think you’re vastly overestimating the speed of capital optimization. The process you describe will take 5 − 10 years. This is especially true here because either:
The task that could be teleoperated (inspection, electricians) is not a major cost center for the business, so there’s low alpha in solving its optimization OR
The task that could be teleoperated is the business itself, at which point you hit all the PR problems A lot of these relationships would have to be B2C or B2B for services and that ultimately is still PR for humans.
There’s then this binomial distribution that makes this harder than it seems.