Transcript: Robots and Humans in the Workplace - w/ Bruce Welty

This is an interesting time in the history of retail, as it really does call into question a lot of the decisions and a lot of the traditions that we've always had around what people do, but their time and how they shop and how products are presented. It's just, it's an interesting time. And I think that we're gonna see evolutionary change. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight, but I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now, we'll look back on this and think, wow, that was really a meaningful inflection point in the history of retail.

We make the pick process so simple that it makes it something that a human can do. What we think is the theoretically shortest amount of time, a theoretical minimum amount of time to actually perform that task. And I know it may sound sort of, how could you try to take time out of that? And the answer is, well, we really care about seconds. So if we can take one or two seconds out of that process, it makes a lot of difference because we do it 20 million times a year.

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell Turner, and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 40. Hello, and welcome to Constructor, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships within your project teams, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule in your construction projects, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. My talk today is with Bruce Welty.

Bruce is the founder and chairman at Locust Robotics and Quiet Logistics. We talk about practical implementation of robots for this day and age. We had an easy conversation about how he first encountered robots and how he built his expertise in software for robots. We even talk about real estate management, e-commerce trends, and how this impacts the potential for warehousing and malls. We talk about the realistic expectation of driverless cars and how sensor tech may not be ready to navigate for the general utilization for many years to come.

So many nuggets. I had such a fun time talking with Bruce. He has a way of making you feel like it's story time when he talks about his experiences, but it's so logical and practical at the same time. I think you'll really enjoy this interview. So without further ado, listen in.

Welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Thank you, it's nice to be here. You are the chairman at Locust Robotics Corporation and Quiet Logistics. From what I understand about Quiet Logistics, it's best known as the quiet back end fulfillment provider for some of the best apparel and accessory brands in the world. Before we get into Locust Robotics, could you tell us how you've encountered your first robot?

Well, sure. My history actually, it goes back about 30 years and then the very early parts of my career, I spent my time automating warehouse using mostly software. During that time, we had great innovations in the use of our codes and wireless computers and other techniques that we used to more accurately manage inventory. And so when I started a warehouse management software company, which I sold in 2001, and then a few years later, got into this logistics business thinking, well, we know a lot about warehouses and I have a business partner named Michael Johnson.

We've been together for a long time and we talked a lot about how maybe we should take this expertise we've developed, automating other people's warehouses and actually go into the warehousing business. So during that time, we also noticed that the world had become more complicated as customers decided or consumers decided they wanted to have products delivered to their doorstep. And that's a much more difficult challenge for a warehouse person. So we thought, well, we should orient our company to support that kind of business. And what we did was we researched a robot that was just coming out on the market from a company called Kiva Systems that we thought was a real interesting, important innovation.

But we decided to build our business around advanced software that we built. Interaction I had with it, and it's kind of funny because the first time I heard about it, I was quite skeptical. Somebody called me up in 2002 and said, hey, there's this new robot company and they're making warehouse robots and maybe you should invest in them. And I took a quick look at it and I said, this is not a very interesting idea. And I passed on the investment.

And then about four years later, I saw it again in 2006 and it was much more interesting and I started to understand it better. And then in 2008, I actually bought some of these robots. And then in 2009, we started our logistics company, Quiet Logistics with the sole purpose of making this technology available to consumers, or actually to retailers mostly. So that those retailers could have this highly automated facility, but not have to pay for it. That's wonderful.

So did you happen to be a tinkerer at all when you were young? Or was it sophomore that you more gravitated towards when you were in school? I think I was a aspiring tinkerer. I used to take things apart to try to understand how they worked. I was probably not as good as putting them back together as I was at taking them apart.

But I generally found, it was interesting to me how things worked. And I was a math major in college. I do have a sort of a logical mind. And I thought, well, mathematics makes sense to me. And I always liked it when there was the right answer in the back of the book.

Oh yes. Really, when you're in math major in college, you come out and one of the first jobs you easy to get is being a programmer. So I became a programmer. And for the first half of my career, I wrote software. Do you mind if I ask, what were your software programs written for primarily?

Was it just software based? Or did they happen to be software programs for mechanical solutions? Well, because of the industry I got into, it was actually software to manage warehouse. You get into most technology today, it's mostly software anyway. Almost every device that you buy on the internet, even cars and airplanes now are pretty much driven by software.

But there's a lot of different levels of software. The stuff is very low level. It might drive a car around or move things. But then there's very high level software, which is the stuff that you work with when you go to an ATM or work with an iPad, sort of what you see on the screen in front of you. And so software is very, it's very many layered, shall we say.

So I think that like a lot of people, I started at the very low level and then moved up into the top level and ultimately became a manager and ultimately started a company that sold software systems, which really has software at every level, the lowest and the highest. And so I have this understanding of how systems work and how software work. And particularly I have an understanding of how warehouses work. And so you combined that knowledge base and we were able to make that work for you using the Kiva robot over at Quiet Logistics.

Yeah, that's what we did, right? And we grew a good business. Quiet Logistics doubled every year for its first five years. It was very quickly profitable. We landed some wonderful barrel and accessories brands that you probably would know by name.

I imagine we have products to most everybody in the country by now through all the different brands we've managed. A lot of times you don't know it's us because our customers put their branding on the box and all we look like is a current address. But that's fine with us because we're the, as you say, quiet backend film and provider. Wonderful. Tell us how you ended up shifting gears into developing your own robot, creating your Locust robotics.

Well, that was actually something we did reluctantly. We were a happy user of the Kiva warehouse robots and we intended to continue to be buying those and using them and growing our business. But unfortunately, Amazon decided that these robots were really cool and they decided to buy the whole company and then they decided that they needed all the robot that this company made. And so we were left out in the cold, so to speak, without any robot. And it made our business model very challenging because all of our pricing and all of our contracts were based on having a very efficient backend system built around these robots.

And we could no longer use them. So we still had our obligations to our customers and to their consumers. So we thought, hmm, we need to find the new robot. So I jumped on an airplane, flew around the world, visited every robot company I could find and I found a lot of really interesting robots, but they were all missing something very important. And basically it was the business software that you need to make the robot do anything.

So after talking it over with Michael, my partner, and saying, you know, what are we gonna do, Mike? If we bought one of these robots, we'd have to spend probably a million to $2 million in just making the robot work. And then if we did that, then the company that we helped would end up with a very valuable robot and it might get acquired by somebody like Amazon again. And we'd be stuck in the same spot. So we thought about it for a while and said, we could probably build a robot for a reasonable amount of money because believe it or not, robots are not that complicated compared to the software to make them run.

And we thought we could add all the software ourselves. So we came back to our board and went into a meeting with them and said, so we've got some bad news and some good news. The bad news is we can't find a robot that works for us, but the good news is we think we can build one. And to their credit, our board agreed to allow us to do that. So that was 2013.

And in 2014, we launched internally inside of the Quiet Logistics, a secret project, develop a new robot. That secret project started 2013. When were you able then to use the first one? Well, we picked our first robot in the end of 2015. So it took us just about two years and it was fairly primitive, the first pick we made, but it worked.

And in order for it to work, a lot of things had to come together. In fact, it was kind of a funny revelation we had that one of us said, hey, you know, somewhere in the world, somebody just clicked the buy button. And here in Massachusetts, a robot started moving. And if you think about all the connections that have to happen for that to occur, it's really quite a remarkable technological achievement. Tell us a little bit about what the robot does that you're now using.

Well, yeah, let's tell us a little bit about the evolution. Right, well, the robot is actually a conveyance device. It mostly moves from location to location. And people actually will walk around a space looking for robots that are signaling that they need to have a pick done. A pick is really the process of picking something off of a shelf and putting it into a basket.

It's something that everybody does when they go grocery shopping. So the robot will signal, hey, I need a pick done and some human will come up, read what's on the screen and it will say, take this item off the shelf and put it in this box. What we do is, in this case, is we take away two of the most difficult things for a human being in the process. One is the walking part. We eliminate as much walking as we can possibly do.

And the other thing we do is we make the pick process so simple that it makes it something that a human can do. What we think is the theoretically shortest amount of time, a theoretical minimum amount of time to actually perform that task. And I know it may sound sort of how could you try to take time out of that in the answer as well. We really care about seconds. So if we can take one or two seconds out of that process, it makes a lot of difference because we do it 20 million times a year.

Okay, so you reduce the opportunities to need for people to walk. And then in addition to that, the amount of time for them to literally pick the item off of the shelf and put it onto the conveyor robot. Right, and then the robot just goes to the next location. But you'll have one person servicing three or four robots at a time. And so they just become very efficient at doing something that is otherwise very inefficient.

How much time do you think is reduced in walking? Or maybe, yeah, could you give us some statistics on maybe one person or just overall in general, how much time is reduced in walking? We think we remove about half of the walking, maybe two thirds of the walking, and we increase productivity by about double. Sometimes two and a half, sometimes it's three times. That entirely depends on how efficient the process that we're replacing is at the time we show up.

If it's a very efficient process, we might only double. But if it's an inefficient process, we've had improvements as much as five times. So how many miles could that reduce in walking? Well, a typical warehouse worker prior to the robotic warehousing picking days would walk 12 miles, 15 miles a day. Our worker walks between five and six miles a day, which is still a lot.

That's about the equivalent of 18 holes of golf. Yeah, that definitely improves the quality of life that the person has when they're working, just because they're not spending as much time on the feet and they're doing productive tasks more often instead of walking, which is a really unproductive task. What's your... I really like that you mentioned that you worry about the seconds. I've encountered the two seconds lean book, but it is how can you improve any process to reduce just two seconds incrementally in order for you to get the most out of whatever task you're doing, whether it's laundry or washing the dishes or obviously applying it to work.

And I think it's a good way to just kind of think about things. But with your expertise and knowing warehousing and software and obviously incorporating the robot, you've been able to shave off a whole lot more than two seconds. So a lot of people talk about the fears of job loss based upon the use of robotics. But we obviously just talked about a few ways where people can be productive by doing fewer waste activities. And I'm considering a waste activity as walking here.

I want to kind of talk a little bit about not job loss, unless you want to do a comparative analysis here, but I understand that there is more opportunity in actually developing jobs based upon the fact there's the use of robotics now. Could you talk a little bit about that? Sure, yeah. I mean, it's always a sensitive topic when you talk about productivity enhancements, because whenever somebody hears the word productivity enhancement, they think job loss. I've been alive long enough to see that there are lots of innovations out there that create productivity increases and a corresponding job loss.

For instance, simplest of all examples might be a bulldozer or a backhoe, right? Clearly, if you didn't have those, then you could give 20 people a shovel and you'd have 20 new jobs. But I don't think anybody in our world aspires to that kind of job creation, because I think we all think we have something better to do than to dig a trench. And so then you have to get into the quality of the job itself, and you have to understand the different contributing factors to what make that job a good job or a not a good job.

And also, what's happening in the world itself. I mean, if we didn't have bulldozers and backhoes, we couldn't build dams, we couldn't build roads, we couldn't build buildings as fast as we do, and all of those have a positive impact on society. So in our case, I look at this and I think, how is this affecting quality of life? And our situation, it's pretty clear how it all works. In the world where everybody's decided that they wanna have their products delivered to their doorstep, we're basically the same price as what they pay in a store.

We have seen a change in many aspects of our supply chain, because that particular function of picking, packing, and shipping is currently done by the consumer in a retail store, free. And if you think across the globe, how many people are shopping at this very moment, that's many, many hundreds of millions of people. And if we're not going to have that resource, which is free, available to us anymore, then we have to find a more efficient way to do that pick, pack, and ship within the warehouse, and to have a lot of people to do that.

And unfortunately, there just aren't enough people that wanna do that job. It's not a particularly pleasant job. So when I think about our contribution to productivity increase, what I think we're doing is we're essentially making that job more pleasant. We're making those people more productive, so we need fewer of them, because we can't find them anyway. So if you went out into any industrial park right now, and that was, just go to wherever Amazon has a fulfillment center, and look at how many job openings are posted.

It's crazy how it's driven up wages, which is a good thing, but it's also made it impossible for a lot of these companies to actually deliver in a timely way so the consumer gets the product on their doorstep. So it's really not a problem of robots replacing humans. It's really just an improvement in the way we perform a function that's very, very difficult to do, given the way labor is organized today. That's kinda how I look at it, and so that's kinda how we think about problems.

Hey, I just wanted to interject here, because we found some data, real numbers about the job vacancies that I thought were relevant, both for construction and for warehousing. So the first one, National Association of Home Builders, they did a survey, and they found that the majority of young adults, 74%, say they know the field in which they want to have a career. Of these 74%, only 3% are interested in the construction trades. The 26% of respondents who did not yet know the career path they wanted to get into, they were asked a follow-up question about the chance they might consider a number of fields, including construction trades, being one of them.

Using a scale from one to five, they were meant to respond. One meant no chance, no matter the pay, and five meant very good chance if the pay is high. Construction trades got an average of 2.1, very low, with 63% of undecided young adults rating it one or two, no or little chance, regardless of the pay. And 18%, they said four or five, very good chance if pay is high. So that's the construction numbers for you, and I can post the link on the show notes.

So the next situation you would imagine is pretty similar. According to techproresearch.com, in March 2017, $26,000 was the average wage of an hourly warehouse worker. In the warehousing and storage industry, the median age of a worker is 39.8 years. So it's also telling that 38, a little over 38% of warehouse workers are over the age of 45. That's, you know, not looking good for the millennials, yeah?

All right, well, let's get back to the interview. And it's so funny that you mentioned how many more jobs are made available when an Amazon fulfillment center arrives somewhere, they start posting jobs. I mean, I know that there is one here, probably about 70 miles outside of the city of Chicago, and there were a plethora of jobs, and I don't know that it has gone down just because of that, and it's not in the city. It's not necessarily easy to get to. It's really interesting that you say that there is actually job creation, and in addition to that, there are not enough people to fulfill those jobs, as it's not looked upon as the most pleasant work, especially if you're anticipating you have to walk 16 miles a day, right?

Yeah, I think it's a tough job. I've done it myself, and I find it not a lot of fun. What about the creation of jobs to maybe even service the robots themselves? What about any software-related jobs to maintain from a software perspective? Tell us a little bit about that.

What are the opportunities? Right, well, there's going to be a lot of robots in the world in the next 20 years, and every robot needs service and repair, and there'll be lots of jobs to do that. I think also robots are 90% software, so there's plenty of work to do. Right now, the innovations that are occurring in the robotics space are around sensors and understanding sensor outputs. You know, if you have a sensor that can produce 20 gigabytes of data in an hour, that's an awful lot of information that has to be sorted out to try to understand what the sensor is seeing and how to interpret those outputs.

So I think that we're just at the very beginning stages of trying to understand how robots will affect our lives, and I think that there's going to be plenty of innovation for a long time as we insert these devices into our daily living. Just given that we talk a lot about construction here on the Constructor Podcast, it's really interesting to just start to brainstorm about the use of robotics on the construction site. I don't have any idea what that's going to look like, but I'm excited about the opportunities that present themselves here.

I did want to touch base with you about happy customers. Tell us a little bit about the efficiencies that are gained from a customer's perspective. Well, I think that it's funny how you mentioned happiness of our customers because in our industry, customers are not happy because they got something accurately delivered. They expect that. The expectations are very, very high.

So all we're really trying to do is avoid unhappiness, and we like to think of ourselves as just a utility that delivers something that people want when they want it without any hassle. That is a very difficult thing to do, as I said earlier in this, when you're doing something 20 million times a year, is if you're just 99% accurate or 99.9% accurate, there's still a lot of unhappiness people in that equation. We really need to use every single tool in our toolbox, so to speak, to help us with delivering things in a timely and accurate way.

And that's part of our solution in Locus, the robotic solution, is to have ways that prevent errors from happening right at the source. We do everything we can to make sure that it's impossible for the picker to pick the wrong item, impossible for the picker to put it in the wrong bin. Having said that, there's still an incredible number of ways people can make a mistake. A lot of it just has to do with the fact that this work is so boring and it's so hard to stay focused on it that you can get confused.

So we really do try to eliminate all those opportunities, but we still have errors. So what we then do is we have a secondary verification process where someone else checks the other person's work, and if there is an error, we correct it at that point. So the great thing about math is if you have two processes that are, say, 99.9% accurate and you multiply them together, you get something that's almost perfect. So we've done a very good job of making sure that these products are shipped out accurately to the end user consumer who really just wants it and doesn't really care how it got there.

The perspective on what happy means. Well, I guess my question is, to the customers, your direct customers that are hiring you to make sure that it's accurately picked and shipped as well, I'd imagine they have the same feeling as well. That's right. They have the same exact perspective, but I can tell you they're even more unhappy when we make a mistake than the consumer is. So we really have to try to make sure that they're both not unhappy in the end.

And if we've done that, we've done our job. It can be seen as a thankless job, but you have that satisfaction that you know you put the systems in place to be as accurate and almost perfect like you mentioned. Interesting. Especially when I think about how many change orders we encounter in construction and added costs. So I'm again, seeing the parallelism here about how robotics could potentially be utilized here in construction.

So hopefully the audience is taking note and brainstorming with me. Thank you for laying that out for us, Bruce. Well, I would say in the construction business, there's a similar challenge, right? Your consumer of your product doesn't care so much about your problems as a builder. And I would say the owner of your building doesn't care much about your problems as a builder.

What you really have to do is make them both satisfied with what they get. And if you don't, you're gonna hear about it. 100%. And I think that looking through the opportunities to utilize some automation within the processes, a lot of these steps are also repetitive and sometimes boring. And they do have some similarities here.

So I do wanna talk a little bit about your inventory, your real estate, what's the square footage? Well, we currently have four buildings each in the range of 250,000 square feet plus or minus. So it's roughly a little over a million square feet that we have for our logistics. Quite a bit of space, obviously, but how do you then gain some efficiencies by your real estate usage? Well, our goal when we lease a space is to create an environment inside the space where we can be super efficient in what we do.

So we spend a lot of time thinking about how materials flow through the building. One of the challenges we have is that at any point in time, the building may be optimized for one set of customers, but within a year, we may have some customers that we lose and some customers we gain so that efficiency, that layout needs to be changed to accommodate the new requirements. So we also spend a lot of time thinking about flexibility and expandability, and I think the thing we like about robots is that they are very good at replication.

So if you can create a process that works in one situation, it's very easy to make that same process work in another situation. A lot of the original solutions in warehousing were built around customized solutions where I would be very efficient with that system in, say, moving around cosmetics, but it would not be particularly efficient at moving around hoarding goods. So what we're trying to do is always think in a very generic way, how can I make this solution broadly applicable no matter what the product is?

Now there are certain products that are outliers. Like we right now have a mattress company, and there are very few automation technologies that allow us to move around mattresses. We also have a company that sells travel luggage, and that is another product that has a strange form factor. But most of the products we ship, about 95% of them, all go through the same process, and that gives us tremendous economies of scale. So we think about how we can take a space that is empty when we start and lay it out in such a way that we can build our business into that space efficiently and be able to make the changes we need to make.

I think one of the trends that we've seen in the industry in the last 20 years is that because a fulfillment center has many more people than a distribution center, a lot of the buildings that are out there do not fit our needs. We need more parking spaces, we need more common areas, we need more bathrooms, and a lot of the buildings that we look at are laid out really just to support a few people and a few forklifts. They can move the same amount of goods because they're moving pallets and cases, but we're moving things at a very granular level.

We call it the single unit or the each level. So that just requires more people. So it goes back to the question of how do we accommodate the more employees that we actually need and still don't have the capability to get the volume still? But we need parking spaces in addition to that for the ones that we do have. How the shift is taking place.

In my research, what I'm understanding is that the retailers are shifting to omni-channel versus it all pretty much all going to e-commerce. Can you talk a little bit about from that perspective? Yeah, that's actually historical, and it comes from the fact that originally retailers optimized their entire business around getting items onto the store shelves as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And then e-commerce came along, and at first it was a very small thing. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, most retailers thought of that as just another store that shipped products to the consumer, but it was never a very big part of their business.

And it didn't really move the needle in their revenue or their profits. So they didn't really care about it, and many of them outsourced it. And as that business grew, the consumers got confused because they might go into, say, a Michael Kors store and buy an item and return it to the store, but they might order a Michael Kors item from the internet site and then go into the store, and the store says, well, I didn't sell you that item. I don't know where that item came from.

I can't take it back. And the consumer's thinking, well, that means there are two Michael Kors, not just one. And that gave rise to this challenge of how do I reunify my business, my brand, so that when people buy something through my Michael Kors store or my shop in shop, my Michael Kors shop inside of Macy's or my Michael Kors website, and how do I make sure that they have the same experience and that every single time they buy something from Michael Kors, they get that full Michael Kors experience and they can treat it as one company and have all the benefits of one company rather than have all these different channels.

And that actually started to be called omni-channel or multi-channel. And it's always kind of amusing to me to look back on it and realize that here we are letting the supply chain get in the way of our branding. Everybody's thinking, huh, I can't provide this service because my supply chain doesn't support it, but the consumer doesn't care. Again, the consumer just wants to know that if they buy a Michael Kors handbag, that they're gonna get the item that they want. And if they don't get the item they want, they can return it to Michael Kors and get the one they do want.

And it became a real challenge as the internet grew bigger and bigger and everybody started realizing that. Every retailer started realizing that they had a mess on their hands. And we're still in the process of sorting that out. It's really non-trivial. And there are a lot of different computer systems involved in these processes and the systems are managed by different companies and they're not integrated to each other.

It's just non-trivial to sort it out. So that's really what's happened. A lot of retailers today, if you talk to the CEOs of these big, huge retailers, they still think that the internet is just a big pain in the ass. Pain in the rear, I guess I should say. Oh wow.

I'm a little excited. No, it's really interesting because it appears that the shift is not obviously going to 100% e-commerce or online shopping. And there is still a great portion of consumerism that's taking place with in-shop retail. But do you think that it's growing? Do you think that it's going to shift to more e-commerce?

Do you think that it's going to kind of stay 50-50? Or what do you think the future may look like for this? Well, I have been watching this grow from the inside for a long time. And my impression is that this is going to grow to a point. E-commerce will entirely replace retail ever.

I don't have a sense of when it's going to stop. I know that everybody's pretty amazed at the growth of Amazon. I think that the number of people that shop exclusively online and never set foot in a store and have changed their behavior to the point now where they really just think of shopping as talking to a little Alexa device. It just astounds me that the behavior has changed so much so quickly. And people don't really think about shopping as price comparison and buying stuff on.

It's really just a utility like getting electricity or water. So Amazon's capitalized on that. And I think Walmart has gotten the religion in the last few years and is changing its business dramatically over to support that. I think there's still a social aspect of shopping. I think there are people who like to shop just in general.

They think it's fun. And I think malls will continue to have a role. I think maybe the class B and C malls will have some trouble because of the brands that they are attracting. And I think that their marginal brands are not going to continue to be supported by the consumer. It seems like consumers are dividing to the top brands and then just commodity.

And they don't really care about in between. So I think we're gonna see a big, well, we have already seen a big sorting out of retail as to companies that will survive and the companies that won't. Everybody has a hard time competing with Amazon because their prices are so low. And in a lot of ways, there's a big argument that says they're too low because Amazon doesn't make profits. And a company that's 150 billion in revenue not making profits is an aberration and it should not continue.

But as long as they're there, people can't compete with them because most of the rest of the companies in the world have to make a profit. But in the meanwhile, you still have these great brands out there selling products at a premium price because people want the quality and they want benefits that come from having a firm that takes the extra care to make product great and supported in the marketplace. All of that is just so fascinating to me. So thanks for telling us what your opinion is on that, Bruce.

I am investigating the utilization of mall space moving forward because of what you said, the class B and C retailers may not be able to survive in such a cutthroat market. And my curiosity is how those spaces will be utilized, whether it be workspace or fitness centers or whatever the case might be. So it's always interesting to see what the shifts are that are taking place. And it's really interesting to hear from your perspective. A mall owners and developers come through our office trying to explore the idea of integrating these malls, these empty malls into the supply chain as distribution points or fulfillment points for e-commerce.

And I find it interesting because for me, it's sort of an unintended consequence of e-commerce internet that now we have all this space. But if you think about the problem, really e-commerce is all about getting the product to the consumer quickly in a branded fashion. And that's a real difficult thing to do if you have just one big warehouse in the middle of Missouri. We do have these malls, which are by definition close to the consumer. So the question is, can we put inventory into those malls, even some of the large anchor tenant malls, the JCPenney's and the Sears, BroBuck, that are being emptied out.

Then turn them into small localized distribution centers. And I think there's a lot of merit in that discussion. And I think we maybe will see that. Certainly we're having discussions with people about it. This is an interesting time in the history of retail as it really does fall into question.

A lot of the decisions and a lot of the traditions that we've always had around what people do, but their time and how they shop and how products are presented. It's an interesting time. And I think that we're gonna see evolutionary change. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight, but I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now, we'll look back on this and think, wow, that was really a meaningful inflection point in the history of retail. I'm getting goosebumps.

It's so interesting to me. And it's really cool to hear the conversations that developers, mall owners are having with you. All right, so I do, I kind of want to rope us in because we've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about fire. We've talked about getting Locust Robotics up and running, the productivity level of employees.

We talked about happier customers. If that's even possible, it's just making sure that they are satisfied. And then we talked about real estate space and some of the implications of how the internet is affecting that. So I do want to sort of wrap up and ask you a couple of questions about the best mindset to adopt robotics in a practical way. What do you think someone should be thinking about if they like the idea and they're looking for ways to maybe incorporate robotics into their own business?

Well, I think a lot of robotic business models today are very futuristic. I think that there's a lot of misinformation about robots around things like job loss and around things like, you know, fear of robots taking over the world. And I think that's not helpful. I think robots are pretty primitive right now. Most all of the ones that we actually use in real life don't do very much.

They can't do very much. And I think a lot of people are looking at a lot of the solutions as game changers, even things like robotic driverless cars. Personally, I think that that's going to take many decades to happen if it ever happened. And it's not so much because the cars can't drive autonomously. I think they can.

It's just that to get from where we are today, which is zero driverless cars, to the future where we have maybe 100% driverless cars, there's this interim period where there'll be people sharing the road with driverless cars, and people are unpredictable. They make more mistakes than cars do. Driverless cars are not able to anticipate every scenario. And we're going to end up getting bogged down in lots of questions around ethics and decision-making of driverless cars. And they're just not sophisticated enough.

We don't have enough processing power. We don't have enough software. We don't have enough sensors. These things just aren't going to work. The human brain is a remarkable thing.

And it's going to take a long, long time before we even can approximate just the simplest of things that our brains do today, especially in the areas of judgment. And I think something like a drone, which is the robot that everybody's familiar with, those have limited capabilities now. They're really just used for photography. It's hard to imagine that we're ever going to overcome battery life problems and the weight you have to carry to make a battery big enough to be able to actually fly any distance.

But we're going to solve those problems to the point where they become ubiquitous. And I might be wrong about that. A lot of people argue with me about that. But I think that a lot of what we're trying to solve with robots is just going to be a very evolutionary process. It's not going to happen fast.

It's going to be little incremental steps where people will find ways to use robots in an innovative way. And I think a lot of the robots that people will use won't look like everybody imagines a robot will look. Like the idea that we're somehow going to make a robot look like a human, behave like a human, move like a human, is just sort of absurd in its face because really robots are better at doing things that humans are bad at doing. And humans are better at robots and doing the things that humans are good at doing.

So why would we ever try to replicate one with the other? I think the robots that we're going to use will look, they might even be invisible to people. They might be underwater. And they might be in dangerous environments. They might be in hazardous environments.

They might be out there in the military field doing things that are dangerous to those soldiers. Those kinds of things make sense to me. Whereas most of the ideas having robot readers and robot receptionists and so on, that just doesn't make any sense to me. It's very frustrating to deal with a robot at any level today around human interaction, things we're accustomed to expect from people who, say, answer the phone or try to help us. So no, that's really interesting, your perspective on autonomous cars and drones and things of the like.

I really like the perspective, just given that you've actually developed and created a robot and understand what it takes to develop the software to create that level of judgment. Well, I guess we'll see what happens in the next 10 to 15 years, right? Wonderful. And then if anyone wants to do a little bit more research on how to incorporate robotics into their business, do you have any recommendations on where they should look? There's sort of no shortage of people writing about robots.

I follow Robotic Business Review, RBR. I also follow The Robot Report by Frank Tobey, who's devoted a lot of his time and effort to unmasking what's happening in the robot world. In a real sense, he's not a hype kind of writer. He's just a matter of fact, and he's very smart. And then there's all sorts of other publications that are more technical.

IEEE does a nice bit of writing. We've seen a lot of writing in the supply chain, trade magazines about the use of robots in warehouses. Even recently, we've been getting interviewed by the mainstream media, like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN. As robots become more prevalent, actually in the case of Locus, we've just entered the market. But it's a huge market opportunity, and I think there's a very big and deep interest in the way we're approaching the problem, which is really to come at it from the standpoint of, what's the business problem we're trying to solve, and how can we have a human and a robot work together to most efficiently solve that problem?

It gets into the area of what everyone's calling collaborative robots. So I think that there's plenty to read in the internet in general, but I think over time, it will be like any other kind of product. It'll just become more and more accessible to people. And our robot, you'll see it eventually, I think, in grocery stores, right alongside the shoppers. We'll see it in manufacturing plants, see it in an airport, moving luggage around.

This will be something that people will just be very comfortable with, and just a part of their world. I love it. So if someone wants to get in touch with you, where would they find you? Tell us the best way to reach out and learn more about what you're up to. Well, I'm available at my email, which is bwelty, b-w-e-l-t-y, at locusrobotics.com.

If you want to chat, just send me an email, and I'll follow it up. I'm also on LinkedIn under Bruce Welty, and fairly active LinkedIn presence. I don't generally interact on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or any of those. So that's the best way to do it, just through LinkedIn or through email. Awesome.

Thank you so much for taking the time and spending, ultimately, the opportunity to discuss about your businesses, and how robotics are affecting society today. I really had a good time. Well, it's my favorite topic, so it's always fun to talk about. I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Bruce Welty. I know I learned a lot, and I hope you did, too.

So do let me know. You can find me on Twitter at BrittanyCT, or LinkedIn. I'm easy to find. Just search Brittany Campbell Turner, or just email me, and let me know there. Brittany at constructor.com.

I want to know how this podcast has helped you, even if you haven't implemented it yet. If you just want to learn more, just email me. Again, that's Brittany, B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E, at constructor.com. Next week, we will be talking with Elise Stringer, senior workplace expert for EYP, architecture and engineering. She is also the author of Healthy Workplace and The Green Workplace.

We talk about the business case for a healthy workplace, fueling the human engine, and choosing the right design elements to enable productivity. We have an amazing talk. So look for my interview with Elise Stringer next week. Lastly, don't forget to subscribe at constructor.com and get email updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes Stitcher.

Please leave a review and show your support, letting me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.