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- [00:00]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
You've probably seen them, they're humanoid robots taking over warehouses and smaller ones roaming around like Wall E. Others are virtual assistant chatbots. All over the world, companies are introducing more and more of what we know as robots into our lives. They're shaping how we communicate, how we work and how we make business decisions. And it's all part of a greater technological trend that has been driving headlines in the last few decades. It's called automation. Yeah, so we realized a few years ago we could make an American made robot that's easier to use, more affordable, and most importantly, capable of performing many more tasks than other robots out there. AI and data analytics are, I think, fundamentally going to transform the financial industry.
- [00:49]
Kevin Surese
I think you're going to see a.
- [00:50]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Lot of automation and intelligence in our software that makes us as individuals more efficient.
- [00:55]
Kevin Surese
I think honest truth is we're still.
- [00:57]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Figuring it out and mistakes or errors along the way happen. We're focused on this new paradigm where you just demonstrate the task that you want the robot to perform and then it can learn how to perform that from the demonstration autonomously. How do we prepare our country and a lot of our industries and businesses for a long term transition to a new kind of economy? I'm senior tech correspondent Samantha Murphy Kelly. This is the next innovation. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what automation is. It's sort of a broad umbrella term for all sorts of applications and uses that involve robotics, AI, software development, mechanical engineering and more. Instead, it's easier to explain what it does.
- [01:40]
Simon Johnson
Well, automation is really quite old. I mean, we've been automating things pretty diligently for thousands of years, but particularly the last 250 years. It just means you're replacing people with machines.
- [01:51]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
That's Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. Simon was previously the chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund. He's been studying the impact of automation on businesses for a while now. And this year he became a Nobel Laureate. When I spoke to Simon, he explained that automation is a general term for producing or operating automatically. If you could build a machine that acted and perhaps thought like a human, you'd have created an automated system. And like Simon mentioned, we've actually been automating for centuries. Over the course of history, we've witnessed the introduction of the water wheel, the steam engine, the compass, the elevator, and much more. In the 1980s, new forms of software engineering made financial analysis more efficient. And now these tools have become essential in our everyday lives.
- [02:45]
Simon Johnson
Technology, improved technology, better technology, more productive technology. Including automation is a big part of how we've changed, how the world has changed, and how we've become better off and healthier over the past 250 years.
- [02:58]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Now in the 21st century, we've mastered areas of computer science to create products that are far more advanced. This includes AI powered softwares that can digest information for employees or machines that solve labor intensive tasks for companies.
- [03:13]
Sam Moffatt
The design came around from that. There was a kind of similar technology on the market. It was this mold type machine that went one direction. We created it to be four directional, also fit to go into elevators. You set the pallet onto a conveyor, it would disappear like any normal automated warehouse. But we could add more of what we call our taxi, which is the.
- [03:36]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Multi directional machine that is Sam Moffatt. He founded Moffitt Automation in 2017 after witnessing the challenges of a traditional one directional pallet shuttle. Now, as managing director, Sam is giving the warehousing industry an unprecedented solution. The Moffitt Taxi, a four directional, fully automated pallet shuttle. The taxi transports multiple pallets through the warehouse, moving backward, forward and sideways seamlessly through the narrow aisles to its destination.
- [04:12]
Sam Moffatt
Giving someone the ability who had 10,000 pallets in their warehouse and having to build a new premises to get to 20,000 pallets. We could actually automate that existing building to double the capacity without needing the capital out there, new land or new building.
- [04:27]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Sam and his team built a 700 pound shuttle that can carry three and a half thousand pounds. A traffic manager then directs the machine by its own software. Aside from traffic control, the Moffitt Taxi is fully autonomous and decides where to lift, place and carry items.
- [04:44]
Sam Moffatt
The utilization rate then is the taxi is looking for what we would call a backload. So it's looking for an order that's going to outbound and driving the whole way to collect another pallet at the inbound station. It wants to take something back down with it so that it's using its battery efficiency, its driving time efficiency and things like that. If there is an order to take out, it'll go and get it and bring it down and then collect the next pallet. The machines all have their own slight AI technology there that will route, schedule their own routes, their paths and where to go.
- [05:15]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Sam's team created a product that enables warehousing companies to save time, money and energy. In a recent study published by the Harvard Business review, more than 90% of surveyed workers say automation increases business productivity. Another study points out that automation, if done right in manufacturing, can reduce operating costs by up to 55%.
- [05:39]
Kevin Surese
The only reason to automate is to do one thing, drive productivity.
- [05:43]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Kevin Surese is a tech entrepreneur and innovator. He's known as the father of the virtual assistant, the original predecessor to Siri and Alexa. During the late 90s, he and his team at General Magic created Mary, a virtual assistant that answered your phone, scheduled appointments, and more. He's an advocate for automation at warehouses. He's witnessed how they can make boring tasks like scanning or packaging less time consuming. This would leave more space for creativity and productive assignments.
- [06:15]
Kevin Surese
Those are highly, generally highly repetitive tasks that no one loved, but there were only humans to do them. Right. And so if you automate part of those tasks, it allows the humans to be much more strategic in what they can do every day. And that's much more interesting to humans than, oh, I have to process this, check again. Right. You know what I mean.
- [06:36]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
But the lure of automation really kicked off in the aftermath of the pandemic.
- [06:40]
Simon Johnson
Global supply chains are vital for transporting.
- [06:43]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Products and services and are crucial for the world's economy.
- [06:46]
Simon Johnson
But four years ago, the COVID 19 pandemic disrupted the network and caused numerous shortages.
- [06:52]
Kevin Surese
Yes, I think it picked up after Covid again. You could not have had the companies doing what they're doing today in the United States without automation having been deployed.
- [07:02]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
For the last 20 years, companies around the world were facing severe economic concerns. Manufacturing disruptions and increased demand led to price hikes. And limited resources. And health guidelines such as social distancing put a lot of pressure on factories and warehouses. Studies show supply chain disruptions rose nearly 70% in 2020. The auto industry reported losses of 50 to $100 million. So automated stacking systems like the Moffett Taxi can help cut labor costs and adapt to supply chain challenges.
- [07:35]
Kevin Surese
Genai is certainly helping us automate things that we couldn't have thought of automating before and interacting with those processes better than we could before. In English. So I could start to automate with very little effort. I could start to automate the creation of blog posts. I can automate the summary of this particular interview, for example, instantly. This is amazing because that was work you or a producer or someone would have to do. And now there's a machine that does it. Right. So this kind of automation is very, very critical. Now we can mix and match these things. I can use AI with bpa. I can use AI within the RPA framework to be smarter about the things it does or to create content. So we're going to mix and match all of these things. And then of course, there's true robotics, which is actually humanoid robots. Right.
- [08:20]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
I want to pause here for a moment to explain something. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned how automation can be a jack of all trades. It can be a six foot tall robot just as much as it can be software on your smartphone. But what's the difference between the two? Kevin just mentioned the three main kinds of automated technology. Bpa, RPA and AI. In other words, business process automation, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence. They are all a form of advanced software engineering which combines with mechanical or electrical engineering. Business process automation consists of a high level understanding of statistics, probability and mathematics. This is the kind of advanced analytics usually employed by financial experts and institutions. Robotic process automation is much more physical.
- [09:14]
Kevin Surese
So when we look at RPA robotic process automation, what we do there is we write code or create code that sits up above your applications. And robotic process automation literally automates those exact things that you would have done with your hands and mouse and keyboard. Exactly right. It mimics exactly that. And it can learn from what you did and then write that in code to mimic it.
- [09:37]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
The Moffat Taxi is a perfect example of rpa, but it takes it up a level by enabling the taxi to move and respond automatically, thanks to AI. Which brings us to our last form of automation, generative AI. This type has been popularized by ChatGPT, but there's more to the story. Artificial intelligence, as the name implies, seeks to replicate human intelligence in machines. It tries to emulate the reasoning, learning and acting abilities of people, all by way of data analyzing software. The cool thing about automation is that you can create a product that combines RPA with AI or BPA with RPA or BPA with with AI. You know what I mean? You can design a machine that maximizes technological abilities and caters to your specific business needs. This is perhaps the key reason why automation has really started to skyrocket. Virtually any and every industry is exploring some form of automation right now. Tech companies are innovating and entrepreneurs are beginning to understand just how much technology can influence growth. This includes health care, the food and beverage industry, construction, E commerce, and finance. For example, remote engineers in Texas are currently monitoring a drill rig in North Dakota. With the help of AI, companies can worry less about liability and focus more on production and cost savings.
- [11:02]
Simon Johnson
Everybody's seen the pictures or the movies of robots putting together cars if you step outside traditional manufacturing. Of course, digital technologies are used all across the world, all across activities. That's what we're using for this kind of conversation. That's what people are using to run their offices everywhere. We can see the automation coming because we can see what kinds of human tasks the computers and software are now better at doing.
- [11:24]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
I really wanted to get a better sense of how automation could impact some of the biggest industries. So I spoke with a fellow journalist, Jennifer Strong. Jennifer has been covering technology for years, including at the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and MIT Review.
- [11:38]
Jennifer Strong
Agriculture is actually my favorite thing to report on. We can find ways to address hunger. We can from the skies using satellite technology and machine vision. We can predict crop yields that are going to be lower and what that is going to mean for given populations. And we can plan in advance now so that it's not, hopefully the emergency that it could be and that we still have time to rally resources or to change something so that we can save parts of these crops or find food elsewhere before there's food insecurity in a given place.
- [12:08]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Jennifer pointed to agriculture as one of the leading industries exploring automation. In a labor intensive industry where weather conditions, seasons, plants and animals each have their own level of unpredictability, AI powered technology and autonomous machines can really make a difference. It's the new age of farming. Cut out the sweaty field workers and insert the robots, and it's probably the most practical solution to an industry plagued by an aging generation and bleak economic numbers. According to the American Enterprise Institute, the average age of farmers increased significantly from 48 in the 1940s to 58 in recent years. Younger generations are increasingly less interested in farming. Some of the effects of climate change are economically palpable as well. Longer droughts, new invasive crops, and unpredictable weather events all reduce crop yields. The price of fertilizing chemicals around the world has soared just in the last few years. The pressures of sustainability efforts are also adding to the strain on productivity. But some farmers are now using driverless tractors, solar powered robots, and spraying drones. John Deere, the leading tractor company, recently announced plans to expand their product supply of autonomous tractors. Farmers can now plow straight from their smartphones, which is wild. Guardian Agriculture is making drones that fertilize plants, making spraying more efficient, less costly and more reliable. Some of them don't even need a pilot and operate 24 hours a day.
- [13:43]
Jennifer Strong
If you look at it, we've had self driving, basically equipment on farms for a whole lot longer and more successfully than we've had self driving anything else.
- [13:52]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
The success of automation in the agriculture industry is expected to stay, but that doesn't mean it's not challenging. The technical and social implications of automation is still being studied. Although some businesses are embracing the technology, others are hesitant to fully commit.
- [14:09]
Charlie Grinnell
I'm Charlie Grinnell. I am one of the founders of Harvest Automation and was since the beginning.
- [14:17]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
The CEO Charlie Grinnell started Harvest Automation in 2008 when he noticed an untapped market in the nursery and greenhouse industry. He comes from an extensive engineering and business leading background. Joe Jones, inventor of the iRobot Roomba, you know, the little robot that roams around your house and vacuums your crumbs, is a good friend. He approached Charlie to explore building a weightlifting battery powered robot for nursery operators.
- [14:46]
Charlie Grinnell
That was a robot for moving potted plants for the nursery and greenhouse industry. Lots of times about half of the work is done outdoors in an outdoor environment, and the other half of the industry is in greenhouses. But it's really people stooping down, picking up plants, moving them around. So lots of repetitive motion injuries, back injuries. So there was a scarcity of workers and a real problem for the industry.
- [15:18]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
It's easy to imagine how a weightlifting robot could be successful for a company like Harvest Automation. But when I spoke to Charlie, he mentioned that for customers and clients, automating was actually kind of intimidating. Many felt that they lacked the experience and expertise to operate a robot. Others feared they could break it. And of course, some were put off by the price tag. It was hard for Charlie to build a machine that could respond to various weather conditions and function smoothly without breaking both the company and the client's bank.
- [15:50]
Charlie Grinnell
It was certainly an extremely technically challenging application to come up with a machine to do that. All the sensing and all the software, all, everything. But if we didn't keep an eye on things, pretty soon you have a wonderful product that the customer loves, but no one can afford to purchase it. It works fantastic for customers, but a lot of them just balk at the price tag. We can't make them any lower and still stay in business.
- [16:24]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
This is all part of a larger societal concern with automating. The price to pay for making robots that cut out the hard manual labor worries many consumers, even company leaders themselves. To them, it's not just about the price point. It's about the value of their work and the fear of losing it. A recent study by CNBC on AI reported that 60% of its respondents are worried the technology could impact their job. And as industries automate at a larger scale, workers feel they'll be phased out completely or forced to learn new skills. Thousands of dock workers at ports across New Jersey and the country are on strike. My name is Francesco de Feliz. I stand in solidarity with thousands of my brothers and sisters. We're here to say that automation cannot outperform the skilled men and women of the ila. Automation for our nation's ports should be a huge concern for everyone. Earlier this year, more than 50,000 port workers across the US went on strike for better wages. And yes, automation, like most companies looking to automate ports, want to increase productivity. The Los Angeles port system, which exports the Most in the US is only 17th in the world in terms of output. In the three days that American port workers went on strike, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey lost between 250 and $300 million a day. And while poor companies agree to negotiate, it doesn't mean automation is off the table.
- [17:52]
Jennifer Strong
There's pressure coming from every direction, and people are trying to decide what to do. And at the same time, in that confusion, I think people don't necessarily feel like they're part of the conversation, like this is a technical thing that the experts are supposed to deal with and they're not really involved or shouldn't be involved somehow, or maybe even feel like they don't have permission to be involved. After all, what do they know about this?
- [18:18]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
This is perhaps the biggest reason why a lot of people aren't fully convinced by automation. There's confusion about how it should be implemented. If your company decided to automate, what particular area would they automate? Would it be a small division or the entire enterprise? Would folks lose their job or would they get transferred to another department? What is the best way to automate?
- [18:40]
Kevin Surese
Plan for a year, where you're going to measure improvements and, and measure it from day one and measure it a couple months in and measure it six months in. And at the end of the year, you could say, did we make the kind of progress that we wanted to make, and are we beginning to see these productivity improvements in customer support or internal productivity or whatever those are?
- [18:59]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
So give yourself time and space to grow with automation. But is that all?
- [19:04]
Simon Johnson
The problem is that automation alone by itself does not necessarily boost the payment working people. And if you don't boost their pay, you're not going to be sharing prosperity. So it's possible to have a lot of technological change in the form of automation without much by way of shared prosperity. Of course, some people get rich, the people who own the machines, the latest and best machines. But what about the workers? Do they also gain?
- [19:26]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Simon Johnson studies how emerging technologies can affect job stability among employees. He's particularly interested in how automation can both elevate business productivity and worker agency.
- [19:38]
Simon Johnson
I think what you need to do is find ways to adapt to technology and to get pay upgrades as productivity increases. So negotiate to participate in the upside provided by technology and hopefully generate jobs. The question is, will the technologies that develop be helpful just to people who already have a lot of education? If you could reshape or nudge technology in the direction of complementing less educated workers, less skilled workers, less experienced workers, that could be very helpful.
- [20:07]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
For years, we've explored how automation can benefit companies. But what if these new technologies platform the worker? Like he said, there's a different perspective to automating. If you empower the labor, you empower the company. But that might not be true if the situation were reversed.
- [20:24]
Jennifer Strong
For a long time we've been hearing that, you know, oh, AI is going to give us endless time to do this. Things we love. But what if the things we love are things of economic value? Does that mean that they can just be automated away? And so to me, some of the conversation feels at minimum unrelated and kind of at worst like in direct opposition to this idea that we're going to automate away drudgery, you know, and just the stuff we don't want to do. What about the stuff we love?
- [20:51]
Sam Moffatt
We're evolutionizing the way we live and this is just another evolution. Those people are getting other opportunities to drive the computer that's going to take the orders in and out. They're getting better themselves. Those fork truck drivers that do not want to work in those cold warehouses, for example, are getting other opportunities.
- [21:10]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Thanks for listening to the next Innovation. This series was produced by Situation Room Studios and powered by Enterprise Ireland. Investing in the next wave of innovation. Our executive producer is Christine Barata and our senior producer is Sharon Barrero. Emily Beeman is our associate producer. Additional production assistance by Global Situation Room. A special thanks to Charlie Grinnell, Simon Johnson, Sam Moffatt, Jennifer Strong and Kevin Serrace. I'm your host, Samantha Murphy. Kelly. Until next.