Recently I experienced a rare day without any client or team meetings on my calendar. I hunkered down and took a deep dive into my email, powering through tasks and to-dos, updating clients, reporters and colleagues along the way. I had documents reviewed, edited and approved via email, and checked in with a co-worker about a deadline via Skype.

By the end of the day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really left my office all day and that my interaction with humans – real, live face-to-face humans – was truly minimal. And yet work moved on seamlessly! This got me to thinking about how technology impacts the way we work today and what it means for employees and managers in the years ahead.

In an article for Forbes, contributor Joe McKendrick writes about the impact that digital and cloud technologies are having in today’s workplaces, particularly around the future of management. “There has been an acceleration of automated decision-making capabilities, in which many day-to-day decisions are handled by algorithms,” McKendrick writes.

As access to technology becomes more affordable and integrated into everyday business, employees across the board have become empowered to use online tools to manage work and streamline processes. This eliminates the “need for layers of hierarchy to process and disseminate things,” says McKendrick, which dovetails with the rising trend he refers to as “the smashing of the corporate hierarchy … fueled by an increasingly educated workforce of information workers.”

As enterprises and organizations continue to utilize cloud-based resources and automate many core business functions, the big question then becomes, “Is management an outmoded notion in the age of the digital enterprise?”

McKendrick’s answer – which I agree with whole-heartedly – is no.

Particularly for creative organizations – and I’m grouping PR agencies like mine into this category – there’s really no substitute for the human side of management. Your computer can run spell-check on a press release, for example, but it can’t determine if the content aligns with your client’s strategic goals, or captures the messages from a conversation you had with the VP of marketing last week.

A report from Kinsey substantiates this (“Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)”): “For now, computers do an excellent job with very well-defined activities, such as optimizing trucking routes, but humans still need to determine the proper goals, interpret results, or provide commonsense checks for solutions.”

True, there are (satirical) programs that will randomly generate a startup company website, but there’s never going to be a way to automate the process of brainstorming or troubleshooting a pitch idea that isn’t resonating with media without at least some human interaction. Even if those conversations are held over Skype or Slack or Telepresence, it’s still the human brainpower that gets the job done at the end of the day. For creative firms, our people are our competitive differentiator.

And for organizations managing PR firms, this is also key.

Here at Communiqué PR, we have been longtime users of cloud-based tools such as Smartsheet and Harvest and Cision that are instrumental to keep projects running efficiently for our clients. They also provide our clients visibility and transparency into our activities and budgets, in real-time, which eliminates much of the administrative work that would have been required even a few years ago.

But again, even by providing our clients with access to these cloud-based tools and reports, there’s still no way of automating the collaborative process that a client-agency relationship involves. In fact, over-dependence on electronic communication can lead to crossed wires around deadlines or deliverables and that can have a real impact on hours, budgets and relationships.

McKendrick concludes, “Technology is an incredibly empowering force, supporting a workforce that is fully equipped with the information and resources that will take people well above and beyond traditional and confining job descriptions.” And certainly, having worked in PR focused on technology-based companies exclusively, I’m a fierce advocate for cloud-based and digital tools that make our lives, and work, easier. But the workplace of today (and tomorrow) will always need their carbon-based, human management to keep businesses and teams inspired and moving forward. All that might change is the tools and the means they use to do so.