When we look at all the current industries, the services industry is primed for another revolution. The last time it re-invented itself was when Richard and Maurice McDonald rethought, redesigned, and revolutionized what a business is—down to their materials, internal logistics, and custom-built equipment. The wow factor was its ease of use, speed, cleanliness, efficiency, and quality—all delivered back-to-back in minutes. It was also half the size of other businesses. Truly, the robots are coming.
What defines a queue?
McDonalds had a single channel for ordering (input) and another to deliver them (output). The 1:1 orders-to-delivery framework made sense at the time and offered more authority over the experience. Controlling the end-to-end experience allowed them to concentrate on and optimize their internal logistics for efficiency and performance.
With the advent of the internet and smartphones in everyone’s pocket, businesses are now accepting orders through multiple channels (online, phone, P.O.S., third-party apps) and delivering them to multiple destinations (line, drive-thru, curbside, tables, house). Such environments created a dynamically generated order-to-delivery channel for every customer on-demand. At scale, this becomes an internal logistics nightmare for any minimum-wage staff to handle—and that is even without taking into account any personalization needs per order. Increasing staff is not an option financially or logistically either, resulting in an unprofitable business very quickly. These vulnerabilities of the service economy can be seen even more exposed with the current pandemic.
Hello, Robotics!
Robots are here to remove the complexity and friction found in the labor work and business components. These robots are invented from within the services industry and uniquely architected and designed to be alongside people.
Suppose a person is not creating but instead laboring with the same repetitive tasks day in and day out. Such an asset will reach diminishable returns very quickly. Since a human is driven by creating, such drive will be soon foregone, as observed with the industry’s high turnover rate.
The goal is to free the laboring individual to be a creative one. Research and technologies in material science, robotics, fintech, blockchain, and artificial intelligence have matured enough to be part of our daily lives.
Having robots serving us is one thing; communicating and interacting with them is a whole other story. For the last two years, we have worked on real-time infrastructures and intuitive interfaces for seamless interactions to level the playing field across all people regardless of their personal needs and circumstances.
The breakthrough here is realizing that we can manufacture and produce autonomous end-to-end businesses for anyone to operate without a business experience.
The Robots are Coming
Altogether, the business is now the robot. In reality, we are abstracting the business out of services since the robot can do taxes on one’s behalf. Such an abstraction will fundamentally usher a future of democratization of services. The business part will become second, while the intention of service becomes the primary thing to seek. The future is where services revolve around each individual for hassle-free living. The robots are coming!
