Ambi Robotics: Jim Liefer

IndustrialSage

Jim Liefer of Ambi Robotics shares his view of prioritizing customer desires and workforce quality of life when implementing ai and robotics.

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Danny:

– Well hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I’m joined by Jim Liefer who is the CEO of Ambi Robotics. Jim, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Jim:

– Absolutely. Thanks for having me here, Danny.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to jump into our episode, learn a little bit more about you. Learn a little bit more about Ambi. It sounds like you’re a robotics company, based on the name. I’m just going out on a limb there.

Jim:

– We are an AI Robotics company. That is absolutely right.

Danny:

– So tell me a little bit about—what exactly are you guys doing? What are the problems that you’re solving today?

Jim:

– Yeah, so Ambi Robotics is an AI Robotics company, as you guessed. We are developing solutions that empower people. Primarily we are in the world of supply chain at the moment, so we are enabling those humans to work smarter. If you think of it in the way of right now the work that they do out there in the parcel world, in that industry, and also in the fulfillment world for retail operations, they are moving packages and parcels around. Our technology allows them to become robot handlers instead of package handlers. That is what the technology does, and that is where our focus is today.

Danny:

– Excellent, alright. Well sounds good. Sounds like a lot of the companies that we’ve talked to, there has just been such a huge acceleration of automation, robotics technology to solve a lot of the challenges that are going on now that were honestly present before the pandemic, but certainly accelerated afterwards exponentially with the, you mentioned specifically in the parcel or warehousing. Ecommerce has exploded. Then there’s nobody there. The labor has dropped.

Jim:

– Yeah, it’s a couple of things. The way that I always think of this is that all of us consumers, we’re on this path anyway of moving from brick-and-mortar shopping into ecommerce, going on our phone, having something arrive at our door basically. Then when the pandemic hit, it just accelerated that 5 or 10 years. I also, the way that I’ve seen this at least here at Ambi Robotics is that during that time where everyone was sort of in their bunker during the pandemic, there was a lot of progress made, a lot of progress made on the AI side, a lot of progress made around robotics and configurations. As you’ve said, Danny, there aren’t humans anymore, so it created this moment where the customer sort of has to find this solution because we can’t serve the need anymore. That’s the journey through the pandemic as I see it.

Danny:

– Oh, sure, absolutely. I’m excited to jump into that a little bit more as we get a little bit later in the episode. Right now—it’s one of my favorite parts. This is when I want to get to learn a little bit more about you. We get to learn more about Jim. Jim, so tell me. How did you get into this industry? How did you get into this space? Take me back.

Jim:

– Okay, well as you can see I have a few years on me, so we’ll go way back.

Danny:

– You don’t look any older than 25. Come on, man.

Jim:

– So I actually started as a computer operator for a bank. I also was mainframe systems operator, had the overnight shift. I was the sole operator, by the way, for this bank. I had this huge amount of responsibility on me to make sure that all the systems were working every day when the bank opened. Eventually I moved from that heavy set of responsibility into the world of 3PL. I worked for a third-party logistics provider, air and ocean freight and all of that around the world. UPS acquired that 3PL in the early 2000s, so now I became a UPS-er.

Through all of that time at UPS on the technology side, I was exposed to different systems and what we were doing for customers. Then I moved from UPS over to Walmart ecommerce as VP of operations at Walmart. Had a lot of responsibility for the ecommerce fulfillment buildings and supply chain for Walmart ecommerce. All of that time, I was in the chair of looking for solutions to the problem, the problem being solving for process, solving for new volume, solving for the labor side. That is where I started on the big company side, and then after six holidays at Walmart, I moved into the exciting world of start-ups and eventually made my way to—the first start-up at AI Robotics was Kindred, and I was there helping them with that product that would serve the apparel industry. Then made my way over here to Ambi about 16 months ago as the CEO here at Ambi Robotics.

Danny:

– Well that’s awesome. Congratulations on that. It sounds like an interesting progression, an interesting journey into that. Throughout that time period, maybe if you could share with me a story or somebody who’s had an impact on your career. It could be a mentor; it could be somebody who gave you some great advice. I know most of the time people have a lot, and they struggle to pare that down. Share with me, who’s that one person for you?

Jim:

– There were many. I had many people along the way. I would say the person who changed the way I think about being in the professional world and also being a leader is a gentleman who came to be my manager in the late 90s, came to that 3PL that I mentioned. He had this perfect blend of challenging the team, uplifting the team, and protecting the team. His name is Gene, and so I always say there is Gene-isms that I talk about all the time. I hear his voice in my head. I hear him saying different things that make me much more of a servant leader and being humble. He changed everything I think about leadership

Danny:

– I like it. Share with me; what’s a Gene-ism that you can share with us?

Jim:

– Well an easy one is, catch people doing something right. He was a big believer in, don’t wait for the moments when you have to tell people, “Hey, you did that wrong,” but catch them doing something right. That’s one. I can give you a second one. The second one is—and it’s very corny—but he said, “Anytime you’re pointing your finger at somebody, there’s three fingers pointing back at you,” which, a lot of people say that. He would always say that, so don’t blame others. Many of those things that just—overall how to carry yourself and look out for the team just meant a lot to me always. Just speaking of that, we have an amazing team here that I think of every day. Caring for this team is my top priority.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. I love that. I especially love that you call them Gene-isms. You obviously are able to quickly rattle them off, and I like it. Corny or not, there’s three fingers pointing back at you when you point at—I love that. I’m curious. I think I know the answer to this, but how is that—obviously it’s influenced your style, your leadership. You mentioned servant leadership there. You mentioned that that was, back when you were at the 3PL. Was that before UPS acquired them?

Jim:

– Yep.

Danny:

– Okay. Were those Gene-isms, as you progressed and you moved up the ladder so to speak, was there a point where it just clicked and you said, “Hey, I need to go ahead and put these into play,” because a lot of times you’ll go through this stuff, and it takes time to absorb. Then there’s a moment where things shift. You say, “Oh, wow, I completely understand from a leadership standpoint how viable and important this is.”

Jim:

– Yeah, so it’s a combination of things. First meeting Gene and all of those things that are Gene-isms, but also the way that he thought about employee engagement and surveying and so all of those things to take care of the team. Then as I told you in my career when I moved to Walmart, Walmart is the place where I heard that term, servant leadership. By the way, Gene and I worked together in several places. The 3PL, we worked together at UPS. He then came to Walmart after I was at Walmart.

The point of that is, it’s a build. I had that foundation, those things I learned from Gene, and then also all of the way that Walmart leadership works and thinks about the customer, so layering that in. There’s a strong customer component. One of the Walmart sayings is that the customer is always right, so I believe that strongly. Then when you tie into the other aspects of Walmart of everyday low cost is another big one for Walmart. Respect for the individual and servant leadership, those components, it just made sense to me. I couldn’t think of leading in any other way, and I think it’s served me really well to this point around being humble, servant leadership, passion, all of those things.

Danny:

– Oh, I love it. I think that’s one of my favorite stories I’ve learned, especially that you have some terminology around it. Gene-isms, that’s very catchy. I’m definitely going to be stealing some Gene-isms. I’d love to hear more later down the road. Well very cool. Let’s pivot a little bit now. Let’s go back to Ambi a little bit. You were talking about, obviously we’ve got a lot of issues with supply chain, with labor. You guys are helping to solve some of that. I guess a big question that I would have is, there’s been a huge influx of robotics companies. If you look at the last several years, it was growing and emerging. One big thing that jumped out to me was, we were at MODEX in 2020. There were AMRs everywhere, AMRs, AGVs, everything. Robotic arms, cobots, Spot was there, of course. Going back in 2018 it was a little less, and further, and there’s a huge emergence of it now. What is your biggest point of differentiation from the crowd, so to speak?

Jim:

– Okay, so we’ll weave this together. You have the technology component, so just to drill into that for a moment, on the technology component, it’s easy to get very excited about that. Being inside the AI Robotics company and all of that, you can get really into your own tech, and you can tell yourself that the simulation to reality transfer learning is the most important thing, and it’s really exciting. The way that the mechanization works with the hand-off between the software side and the mechanical side, that’s really cool. I say that because, as words of caution. Yes, that’s really cool, but—and the way that we’re differentiated is, the customer doesn’t actually care about those things specifically. The customer, and this is where Ambi is very different, the customer cares about their throughput, the volume that’s coming at them, the uptime, the ability to reposition labor—labor, human labor, reposition in their places of buildings and whatnot, and that is the primary differentiator for Ambi is that we care about the key metrics that the customer cares about.

Yes, it’s great that we have the technology to rely on and we can bring the solution, but if you’re not shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer being attentive to those key metrics for them, I don’t know how you can truly win because you win when they win. I want to go back to what you were saying about MODEX. I saw the same thing. This MODEX that we just came from a couple months ago, kind of shocking how much technology there is everywhere, like robots and picking robots and all of that. As I said, though, there has to be a lot of realness. It actually has to be solving their problem, their specific problem that you have to configure for. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.

Danny:

– You’re 100% right. That’s the product developer’s challenge. Hey, this is super cool. This is great tech. That’s awesome, but is it an addressable market? What’s that need that you’re tangibly solving? One key thing you mentioned, that you were shoulder-to-shoulder with a customer. What does that look like specifically? Let’s say as you’re going through R&D, what are those practical things that you’re doing to really have a true understanding of your customer’s needs to develop something that says, “Hey, this needs to be addressed, and there’s a need for this?”

Jim:

– The first part is, it’s helpful that you have knowledge of what’s happening within the four walls. That’s useful. I told you I came from UPS and Walmart.

Danny:

– That’s helpful, yes.

Jim:

– That’s super helpful is to have that understanding, know the terminology. That aside, going and looking at the sites and understanding because you can’t say that—let’s use Walmart and Target as two examples. You can’t say that those two entities are providing fulfillment operation in the same way. There’s all kinds of different permutations, and in fact within any of those large retail entities, they might be doing it different ways at their different buildings because one of them is more manual; one of them has more high-speed sortation and so forth. Going through the operation and understanding the process and understanding what’s causing pain to the people there, the people at the line level and the supervisors and others, that is the key when you develop the system, and the Ambi solutions are highly configurable, both on the software and the hardware side. That’s what allows us to, and I’ll give you a couple examples. A, we can be upstream before high-speed sortation. We can be doing something around induction, or after high-speed sortation you can then provide more output locations from an AI robotic perspective. But it just depends on what the customer needs in that site and for that market.

Danny:

– No, absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. What are some of the big challenges? Obviously we know that labor is a massive one. Supply chain is another really big one, which are very inter-related. What are some of these challenges, though, beyond that, are you seeing with your customers? Or even in the industry in general?

Jim:

– In the industry in general, let’s first say for AI Robotics’ industry. What are those challenges? The way that I always think of it is, for a start-up, and for any of those where we are creating solutions that have never been in the world before, and also, by the way, the same kinds of challenges that businesses have that have been around for a long time which is around focus. As I said a moment ago, focus on the customer. Take care of your team. And I would say making sure that you have the ability to deploy what you say you’re going to deploy. It comes down to, it’s basic stuff of do what you say you’re going to do. If that’s what you commit to, then do it. That’s the big overarching.

Going to the broader industry around, let’s just say supply chain is the—this phenomenal growth that happened, as we said, in the compression time of the pandemic is ongoing. The number of—if you think about supply chain in terms of last year there were something like 130 billion parcels in the world. 130 billion is this number to wrap your head around, and then only something like 25 billion of that was in the US. And all of those parcels are being touched three to five times, so it’s an enormous problem I guess is what I’m saying from a challenge perspective. There are so many places to go after that problem, all kinds of different directions but that is the challenge is the volume, the speed that all of us as consumers are demanding that we have it to our door, and the variation of all of those parcels. It’s everything from little, tiny things to very large and flat things and rigid and deformable and all that. I think there are seemingly endless challenges around those problems and different ways that you can solve it.

Danny:

– That’s a fascinating stat. I have not heard that before. You said 130 billion parcels out there, and only 25% were basically owned by the US, so to speak?

Jim:

– 25 billion of the 130 billion in the US. All of us that have packages arriving at your door, you would think that the US is leading, but actually we’re not. There’s many more parcels out there. I just think about where these solutions could go outside of the borders of the US to deploy these solutions and solve that problem.

Danny:

– To get into it, I’m sure the parcel—what am I trying to say? What I’m trying to say is, how much of this is consumer—I guess a lot of it ultimately is going to be consumer-driven, but relative to parcels that is B2B versus B2C, OEM parts versus a package of masks or pens.

Jim:

– Yeah, the numbers that I’m talking about are B2C and—there was something other. These are all parcels. This is all just parcel volume out there. It might be that it’s much larger parcels, sort of non-conveyable parcels. Yeah, that’s a lot of that.

Danny:

– Well that’s a lot. Like I said, I hadn’t heard that stat before. I think that’s fantastic. That’s pretty interesting. One of the things that I have heard that they’re reporting is after the pandemic, you get into March, April, May, I think through 2020 that ecomm, for example, exploded. It was like a 40% growth just in that year alone which obviously is going to accelerate, push all those parcels there.

Jim:

– It’s about parcels, and it’s what we also call eaches. Again in this world where we moved from product going into distribution centers in full cases and those full cases going to stores, and then people would put them on the shelf so you and I could go buy them, now that doesn’t happen anymore. Now all of those full cases are opened up at the distribution center, and the worker has to take out the each. The bottle of water, if you will, and then that goes in. Maybe you mix that with a bottle of water and, I don’t know, a mobile phone or something, things I’m looking at now. Then that goes into a parcel. Everything at this each-level has caused—it’s adding to the challenge because there’s just not enough human labor to manage all those eaches. It’s actually really fascinating.

Danny:

– Yeah there was an interesting stat at the A3, their conference I think last summer in Memphis. There was an interesting stat specifically about that, talking about as the growth of ecomm comes in, and I can’t quote it 100%. It was a very short time period, within I’d say three to five years, that the amount of jobs needed—which we’re already, right now I was reading a stat, it was, there were 6 million people short for jobs right now across the board. That is going to increase even more, but specifically into this warehousing and ecomm piece specifically because of that, as everything’s becoming more distributed.

Jim:

– Yeah, there’s several vectors to it. While we were talking about all of this volume and the throughput need, also the other thing to say is that no one—not no one. Few people want that job because that kind of work is quite onerous. The environments, those environments are not set up well for humans. They’re hot in the summer; they’re cold in the winter. They’re loud; there’s forklifts. There’s horns; there’s all kinds of mechanization going. The way that we want to help in the industry, and we want to uplift those workers’ lives, is that you put a robot solution there, and then that person can interact with their robot instead of having to interact with all those eaches. It’s just a far more fulfilling kind of a role, and just to tie this back, the symbiotic part of it is that the worker has a more meaningful role. They stay in the job. It benefits the person who has given them that job, so they have a better relationship. We feel great to be a part of that.

Danny:

– One thing that I’d be curious about, just as far as your technology and what you have, just from a training standpoint, you were mentioning one of the challenges, one of the things you often hear with automation whether it’s robotics or whatever type of automation, that oh, we’re taking the jobs away and whatnot. And we can say, “Alright, first of all, the reality is it’s hard to find labor right now.” People are saying, “I don’t want to do this,” for whatever reason. “I’m done with this; I’m moving on,” whatever. The reality of it is, there’s a big gap there, but let’s put that aside for a second. For those who are actually still in the workforce, there is fear and trepidation sometimes. Hey, this process that I do over and over again, maybe I’m going to get replaced. If we can train and redeploy that existing workforce, as you mentioned, you’re going to be assisted by, with a cobot. What does it take, from a training standpoint, that you’re seeing with your customers to be able to redeploy an existing workforce to have, hey, I’ve got a cobot here, and then here’s the new process?

Jim:

– That’s such a great set of questions there. Our approach has always been—let’s go back. The former way that perhaps this problem was being approached and that people were reacting to was robots are going to take our jobs. You can have a dark facility, and it’s all just robots doing all of this stuff. We’ve never believed that. We believe that in order for the solution—take the AI technology. I talked about virtual to physical transfer learning. You take the AI; you take the configuration capability. It needs to have a human interacting with it. So the human work changes, as I said, You sort of up-level that human’s work, so we’re very proud of what we think of as human-centric design. All of our systems have the human worker in mind in terms of the user interface that they have that tells them what’s going on and how to do something, so lights and indicators, things like that. That’s number one.

Number two, we have developed what we call the robot operator program, so think of it this way. If you’re the customer and you’re managing this facility and you’re hiring these people, we’re working with our customers to allow our customer to post jobs that say robot operator in a parcel facility. Now you can post the job for a robot operator. You can bring the person in, and we have programs that we’ve worked out where, for example, there’s additional training. You can do training right from the user interface at our system. You can also do training online, so it uplifts them in a way that they get to learn new things. Then there’s of course moments of pride around Ambi apparel and pins and things like that that help them feel like, this is great. I get to come to work, and I get to interact with this robot. I think the world of thinking that robots are going to take over all these jobs completely is, really doesn’t make any sense.

Danny:

– I think that’s interesting, your robot operating program. Have you seen, when you’ve deployed this, that your customers are finding it may be a little bit easier from a recruiting standpoint to recruit new workers in because it’s fascinating and it’s new technology?

Jim:

– Well, so yes, and I want to say one of our key customers has told us just recently in the last month that when they post for this role—and just to say levels—when they post for this role they are able to post as a level 4, and I don’t know the distinction between 1 and 4 and 10, but they talk about it as, “Oh, it’s a level 4.” There’s many more people that are interested in level 4—it just seems to make sense—than they would be a level 1 which is just the very basic stuff. Finally, because you asked about training and familiarity with the solution, we find it to be a half-day, sometimes less, for them to understand how to interact. It’s very intuitive. Even I can do it, so it’s pretty easy to learn how to interact with the robot.

Danny:

– No, that’s awesome. I brought my son, he’s eight, to MODEX, so he could see all this. He’s been begging me. I went to ProMat in 2019, and there was an R2-D2. Somebody had, I think it was a—

Jim:

– Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that.

Danny:

– I was like, “That is awesome.” I sent videos, and he was like, “Dad, you have to take me to Chicago next year.” So anyways, we didn’t see R2-D2, but that’s okay. There was a lot of really cool robots, and one of the things that stuck out to me is that, how easy it was for him to be able to program and do, and the excitement. And I’m thinking, “This is amazing where the technology is going now.” You said half a day; you can go, and you can train on this. It brings a new sense of purpose and excitement to the role, and it’s assisting in a very material way.

Jim:

– Yeah, well first of all I just have to say right now, please don’t tell my nine-year-old that your eight-year-old was able to go because he specifically asked me, and I thought somehow that you had to be 18 to get in there.

Danny:

– You are; I didn’t know that, so anyways, we’ll just cut that from the—

Jim:

– Yeah, yeah, okay, we won’t talk about that at all anymore. And also the other thing is, our kids will be—my son is much more capable to do anything related to technology than I am. It’s pretty fascinating to watch him do stuff on his iPad. Yeah, I think back to the interacting with our system, the intent was to make it easy and approachable so that the employees of our customers would have no hesitation. And just that point of, is this robot going to take my job? In the early-on time, we were concerned with that in terms of our first deployments. What we found to our delight is that there’s a lot of pride. People, the employees out there, the warehouse workers that are doing this hard work, very proud of the fact that they have their system and their—one operator I spoke to one day, she was doing a selfie to send to her kid who is in high school. She was like, “Now I can send a selfie that I’m working with this robot,” and her high-schooler wrote back and was like, “Mom, that’s really cool. Can I work there at some point?” Who would think that? Who would think that that would be a world where her kid, her teenager would be excited to come do the work that she’s doing?

Danny:

– Exactly, and I think we’re seeing that play out. That’s awesome. That’s great. Okay, so great stuff here. I have one final question. This is a fun question. Here it comes. It’s the magic wand question; I’m going to give you a magic wand. You can solve one industry challenge, but it can’t be labor. It can’t be supply chain, and it can’t be my prospects, companies that I’m talking to, wide open, I need my solution. What would that be for you?

Jim:

– Okay, it can’t—and it’s one of my customers who we’re asking, or just anybody in the world?

Danny:

– Just in general. A lot of times people say, “Hey, listen, I wish procurement would just be like, go ahead. Oh yeah, this is easy to deploy. We need this; go.”

Jim:

– I will put it in this place of—I’ll use our general technology and capability and the thing that I wish was possible in the world. which is, we are still a long way off from robots being able to do things in the way that we look at, like you look at a future, sci-fi kind of a movie. I guess the one thing that I would wish for is an advancement such that the robots have broader capability from the start. I think about a couple examples. I think about having robots that are, I don’t know, going down the street. One of them is how, this notion of, there’s a few people working on this notion of delivery to your door. I think I want—maybe I don’t want this, but I think I want a world where there’s robots that are out there interacting more in the world with us humans and uplifting all of us. There’s a lot to be done in the world. You look around, and you think, “Why did somebody not pick that up,” for example, or whatnot. I suppose that’s my one, and again I’m thinking that world hunger is off the table in terms of answers that you were looking for. I think that that is one, and it will come someday, but I want it to be in my lifetime.

Danny:

– I think we’re beginning to see more and more of that. One of the funny discussions that I had on that topic with my son after coming back from MODEX, he was like, “Dad, they need to make a robot that can pick up my room and can clean up.” It’s funny, but you start seeing there’s more. You’re starting to see more things slowly roll out. Let’s take lawn care for example. Husqvarna’s got their robotic—and certainly the Roomba’s been out forever. Yeah, that’s interesting to think we’ll see more of these things slowly deploy out. I think safety is probably the big thing right now, but even more. You go to, what is it, I believe the airport in Cincinnati. They’re rolling out with a lot more of robotic solutions that are cleaning and trash. There’s a couple of things. It seems to be a good—they like to test a lot of things there.

Jim:

– I would say your son has a really good one, and if I had thought for a moment about my son’s room, because again it is such a mess. It’s not even—it’s just clutter. There’s a lot of projects going on in there. Yeah, I think that we live in a time where, just look back over a couple of generations and look at how the hockey stick, where this is going. It’s pretty amazing, and hopefully I’ll be able to live long enough to see other huge strides forward. What we’re doing right now is also incredibly exciting, so I’m happy for what I have.

Danny:

– That’s awesome. Well listen, I think it’s exciting. I think that world definitely is coming. It’ll be very interesting to see what that looks like, the world of the Jetsons that we were all told was going to be here in 2000. It’s a few years behind. But listen, Jim, I have really enjoyed our conversation and our time. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your story and letting me sort of poke and prod a little bit, asking you some questions that may be relevant and on and off topic. I appreciate it. You’ve been a good sport, and I appreciated it.

Jim:

– Loved your questions. Thanks, Danny.

Danny:

– Alright, well thanks. Okay, well that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Jim Liefer who is CEO of Ambi Robotics. If you’d like to learn more about what they’re doing, you can go to ambirobotics.com. There should be a link in the show notes or on the webpage or wherever you’re watching or listening.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much. Listen, if you’re not subscribed, I highly recommend subscribing. Why? Because you’re missing out on great content like this that we do every week, and there’s even more stuff coming. We even have a really cool documentary series that’s going to be rolling out very shortly called Industries of the Future. You don’t want to miss that. That’s going to be fantastic where we’re highlighting what companies are using technologies to roll out, for solutions for their customers’ problems, things like computer vision and robotics, AI, bioenergy, all really cool stuff. That’s all I’ve got for you. Thanks so much, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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