Catching Up with Morgan Wilson (Linkedin Live)

Nikki, Ali G, and guest host Courtney catch up live with Morgan Wilson, Partner Success Manager at SVT Robotics.

Last time Ali G and Courtney spoke to Morgan live about her experiences at SVT Robotics and her outreach with customers. They talk SVT's work with diverse technologies and custom systems, potential application of certain automation, and the evolving landscape that is automation.   

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey everyone and welcome to I think our second live of 2024 automation ladies. I've no idea what episode number this is going to be, but that's part of the fun. We're actually booked out now ladies until I think April. So we've got a lot of really fun guests. Some of them first time guests. And then some of them like Morgan, where we just couldn't get enough the first time and we need them to come back.

Uh, and tell us more and give us updates. The other cool thing is, you know, obviously a year or two, in the span of a career can for some people mean a lot of changes. We've had some people, you know, complete school and get go on to higher positions. And so pretty excited to bring you some of those, touch bases.

With previous guests, as well as make room for new guests, new parts, new members of the automation ladies community. So those of you that are here, please let us know in the comments. If you're joining, that's part of the fun when we do these live. And, [00:01:00] uh, welcome Morgan. Thank you for joining us on the show.

Awesome. Thank you, Nikki, Allie, Courtney, for having me back. Our first show was live at, Grace Solutions in Kentucky, which was a blast. I'm looking forward to going back with you guys, hopefully, this year to Bourbon's Thoughts and Trots. But yeah, excited, excited to catch up with you guys with all the good things that 2024 is bringing us.

Absolutely. A lot, a lot in the works, that's for sure. And actually, so we are lucky enough to have Courtney with us in a chair in her office. The automation lady is hot on. She wears a lot of hats as do most of us. And it is very nice to have both her and Ali here. And I have to thank Allie for covering for me yesterday on an interview.

It'll be the first one where it's not me, but at, well, no, not the first one. Because actually, the first one was, Morgan's interview last year. Because I was stuck on a plane at O'Hare. And Allie and Courtney and Allie Walker graciously ran the show without me. So I know I'm not needed [00:02:00] here, but I'm happy to be here with you ladies.

Courtney, we desperately need you, Nikki. Thanks for giving us a little, uh Hi, and an update on what you're up to. And it looks like you're at the URG office down there in SoCal. Is that right? Uh, yeah. Right now, I am getting ready to go to the SLAS trade show in Boston. So, just getting a bunch of demo equipment ready and, yeah, it's been nice for, like, a whole, I think, 13 minutes.

I've not been in motion. So, uh, we'll, we'll call this your little rest period for the day. And then you have a big show coming up in, uh, like you said, our only West Coast show in Anaheim. ATX, it used to be called, I think they're changing it now. IME, if I remember correctly, so it's still ATX. It's always been like 5 or 6 trade shows in 1, but informa.

Uh, kind of just refers to all of them now is just IME West, you [00:03:00] know, Southeast. I don't know if it's all 4 directions, but this is IME West. Yeah, and it's one we've like, I personally just consider it like my trade show because we don't get a whole lot of trade shows on West coast. So I have always either exhibited or walked or, you know, 1 year I got to a front seat to see Jamie Heinemann from the Mythbusters give a little pitch.

That was pretty cool. But, thanks to Greg McIntyre relieving me a day earlier from this last show. I'll be back in time to attend that 1 and you have several talks, right? Ah, yeah, a few. I'll post about them later. They're all evolving. Like, it took all of 10 minutes for me to say I'm going to be back, for me to start volunteering to do stuff.

So, okay, so watch out for some posts, um, from, we'll post it on Automation Ladies as well, where you can find Courtney at the ATX West IME show, because she is the only one from Automation Ladies attending. I think we've been asked quite a bit. So we'll be able to find her there. We can facilitate those introductions.

If [00:04:00] anybody wants to meet Courtney, I'm in Anaheim in a couple of weeks. I'll wear the hat. How are you doing? I'm gearing up. We got a big contract a 5 year and we want to get it, like, paying out sooner than later. So we're like, right now. Courtney pendant is like on the other side of me working on a level of efforts and scope of works of work We know that we kind of need to do and I met with the customer and was like Hey, I have all these ideas of things.

I know that are broken. Like do you want us to propose fixing them? And I gotta go ahead on like almost all of them. It was only three of like 30 that he was like No, we don't need that So everything else was like go ahead and show me what you know what you're gonna do to fix that stuff and so we're excited to put as much in the works as possible and just Keep an eye on that.

And I think before we were like, I don't know, not so much on our [00:05:00] sales game. And now we're like figuring out like, how do we never let that down? Like, yeah, we have projects and that's awesome, but we can't stop, get more, keep our eye out for more work. Cause maybe we have this big contract, but like we have to keep thinking about.

How to use that money and so yeah, how to help the customer and there's a thousand ways But if you don't bring it to the customer's eyes, they may not there's no reason for them to think about it So bring them that stuff to think about and so that's where i'm at right now is just Like my brain is exploding with like, how do I get these people to work?

And what does the customer need? So it's both obviously I can't just put them to work on nothing Yeah, that doesn't benefit the customer. So what is broken? What do they need and how do I get all these people working? And then we're also doing you know a little bit of a partnership. It is a partnership.

 With uh You know, Courtney's other business, first one. So, there's a lot of stuff. This year we're going [00:06:00] to have Mariam Suleiman from Nigeria right now. She's in Rwanda, but she's going to intern with us in Washington for four months. Nice. So that means she'll be here for 4th of July.

So that was part of the application was like, how are you going to teach her about Americans? And I was like for the July. Yeah.

Seattle has every kind of food. So we'll take her to sushi and like she has diet restrictions, but she can still eat all kinds of vegetarian and we can feed her we could feed her American which american is really just everybody else's stuff Right. We're like a giant hot pot.

So I'm like excited to just feed her and then I want to go to the space needle for the firework. That's what the thing is going to be this year is like, can we like, because now COVID was so depressing. We had like. Hey, have a virtual like fireworks thing. I'm like, Oh my God, you have a picture of the space deal with fake fireworks behind it.

 [00:07:00] So I'm excited, but there's so much stuff this year. IMTS is going to be huge for us. So there's different shows we're going to go to. I'm about to go to, trace root con, which is, uh, something with, Josh Varghese. And it's about industrial networking and it's a class. And there's a lot of, Owners of systems integration firms that are going to that.

So it's gonna be kind of cool clash of the titans or really maybe coordination collaboration of the tights, whatever. Yeah, I want to bring that. So we don't talk the whole time. At least talk to Morgan a little bit. I keep going. This is great for me, but collaboration. I mean, that's your jam, right?

Partnerships. Can you tell us, give us a little refresher on what you do at SVT Robotics. Awesome. So what my role really is as a partner success manager right now is I'm helping our partners in our ecosystem solve problems faster by giving them a consistent and repeatable way to implement their technology.

So really what does that do? Implement. It's resulting in a faster time to live for them. So everybody knows [00:08:00] right now. Why is it so difficult to automate? Why is there so much complexity across the supply chain across manufacturing? And that's really because no technologies are the same. No API is the same.

They're not designed to communicate. And that has been a bottleneck that SVT has been really on out on a mission to solve. So can you explain those that don't know, like, haven't looked at SVT's website, in, I guess, layman's terms as much as possible. What do you guys actually do? I see a robot behind you.

Yep. Obviously some shelving and stuff. Oh, yeah. So some use cases or what? What part of the technology do you guys focus on? So really what I want you guys to think about the major challenges. Um, what challenges bring, you know, when you're bringing on a new technology of any sort and connectivity. So how is that system going to talk to another in your warehouse?

Your distribution center doesn't necessarily have to be hardware. It can be a software. It can be a WMS. It could be manual data. I. O. T. Devices. How is it going to connect to other things? [00:09:00]Second thing is, The monitoring aspect of it is monitoring that connectivity, making sure everything is healthy, and that it's running.

And the third thing is if it's unhealthy, you know, how do we get things back online and how are we going to resolve these issues quickly? So really SVT provides a connectivity to this environment of this ecosystem of all these crazy disparate systems, in the complex world that we're living in.

Okay, so the robot behind you guys is yeah, behind you, you guys make that or is that another manufacturer's robot that's running on your software or something like that? Correct. Yeah, we do not resell any hardware. Everything that I have in the SVT Experience Center down in Norfolk is all partner donated.

So the ones that are kind of looping behind me right now is a Locust bot, Picking AMR and Six River Systems, another Picking AMR. We'll have some new ones coming here soon that are new to the market. Us from LG and repute us. So keep out for those. But, what I want you to think of when you guys hear of the soft bot platform is like they're a little adapters or a [00:10:00] Rosetta stone to existing API APIs that live out there.

 That they're already in the marketplace. So again, SVT platform is just an integration layer that helps connect all of these different systems. Okay. I have a question for a system. Uh, systems and I'm familiar specifically with something called wind nine 11, which can let you tie into something called factory talk view alarm and events, to call text and email.

Can you guys, if I knocked that robot behind you over, can email somebody or call somebody? That I did that a part of the platform's tool set is this awesome capability to monitor the health. So really, everything that's happening, all the data and the messages that's coming through the system is all being tracked.

And now this year we're releasing, uh, SMS alerting. So. To be a, like ahead of the game and we've already, it's already in some customers hands and the tool has been amazing. So it really, it's a single support tool, which is also huge. I'm [00:11:00] sure you guys understand, you know, having five 

different things open at the same time trying to monitor everything that's going on where now SVT brings it all together for you. So a single support tool to monitor the latency and really reduce those help desk calls that everybody hates, you know, a lot of finger pointing a lot of, you know, it's the tool is like tier one support built in where everything's right in front of your face for people to isolate the errors.

You guys are integrators, so you're not actually built, you're not producing your own hardware or software, you are helping everybody make everything talk with your robots, because there's robots everywhere. But if you build the software, that like, does that, ties it together. Some custom software, okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, there's software and then you're gonna hear me always talk about soft bots and the soft bots. There's a soft bot for kind of each individual technology. So it'll be a soft bot for a warehouse management system or a manufacturing system. There'll be a soft bot for, you know, the robots behind me.

 Could be an I. O. T. [00:12:00] Soft thought all different ways. Is that like simulation? What's a soft bot? And can you guys do assume if someone comes and says, I think I want to do something like, can you simulate especially because there's robots involved? Or is that just like a different service? I would say different service.

So all we're taking is the, OEM. So whatever, you know, API is like we're meeting the technology where they're at. So they all speak different languages. We don't care what they come in. Jason, you know, all the others that are out there. And really, as you guys know, from the world that we've been living in, traditional integration is done by point to point integration right now.

Like that is the traditional old way of doing things. And it's all custom coded and it's extremely inflexible, which is the problem. It's super brittle. It breaks when you want to upgrade. , what if your market needs change? What if, you know, the operations team is going off to all these trade shows soon and they're going to see all these nice new hardware and IT at home is like, Oh I have to support all this, you know?

So it's it's been a crazy [00:13:00] ride. , I love what we're solving and I'm super, Just I'm so happy at the position I'm in because I get to learn about all these great solutions and at the end of the day, we're just really trying to help our partner network with like defriction in that process and implement it really fast without custom code getting rid of that.

That's pretty exciting. It's Courtney. Go ahead. I was about to ask from. Yeah. Well, I had a question from the standpoint of, like, let's say, like, an that wants to be included in this. Are you guys being approached by saying, hey, I'll give you a robot. Please make me 1 of your. One of your Rosetta Stone volumes help us scale.

Yeah, that's really it. You know, is they're looking at us as like an easy button for integration. It's repeatable. It's turn key. Of course, every site has its own health and heartbeat. You know, there's a little bit of mods, but really, at the end of the day, getting them 90 percent there can scale so much quicker for deployments.

 And that's what it's all about. That robot's going really fast. Is he allowed to go that fast? Oh [00:14:00] yeah, yeah, they whip around here. And what's really cool is, some of these AMRs have like route optimization, so sometimes we get them at the beginning, they're a little slow putting around, and then when they get the hang of the area, they're whizzing around, so it's great.

Some of the technology that's in some of the robots now. Very cool. So URG has some AMRs like that, right? That maybe should, could or should be plugged into the part ecosystem with Yeah. The reason I'm asking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some AMRs, that we represent from, one of our, um, owned companies in Spain, robotic, um, awesome.

And I'm just, yeah, I'm just curious to see, at this point, learning how to make them talk to other stuff. So more conversations should happen. Probably looking forward, looking forward to it. Courtney, send them my way. Collaborations happening live on automation. Let's go. Is that normal to know where the AMR is?

I've never worked with AMRs. And so if they move around, that's part of the data is like, [00:15:00]where is he? Yeah, a lot. A lot of those companies don't expose the X Y coordinates, which is interesting. But the fleet managers that have, like, there's a fleet manager typically with all these A. M. R. S. And that's really where you can see where are the robots.

 But there's some new part of it. Yep. There's some new coming out, you know, that's kind of helping with optimization that's helping with, being a traffic cop, you know, so that's gonna be really cool to see this year is how some of that stuff comes to life. Yeah, what are your thoughts on humanoid robots?

You know, unfortunately, we're living in a world where it's hard to get labor. You know, I hear it on every single call, uh, labor call outs, safety call outs. So, you know, if we can save a couple of people's back and they want to lift the heavy boxes, go for it. I'm excited to see how the trailer, load and unload robots and AMRs continue to scale, you know, so people aren't breaking their backs.

So big safety call out for sure. Humanoid bomb squad. Yeah. Yeah. If it's going to help people like, you know, health wise, I'm here for it. But, that's one big thing is I think people think robots are going to take [00:16:00] over jobs. It's like, no, they're trying to make your life easier. Yeah, and I think a lot of cases like the pushback I've heard and seen with humanoids is that , they're not an optimal form factor.

Like, we're trying to replicate ourselves, but doesn't mean that that's the best form factor for, and you see, like, these AMRs right on wheels, they're a lot faster on wheels than they are if they're walking with the bipedal, with legs. But somebody made a good point, at the A3 forum, one of the companies was presenting, was that in some cases, you can't fit a wheel base into certain areas.

Or environment or doing a certain emotion, right? You may wanna mount the upper body of a humanoid on a, you know, wheel base. But in other applications, you actually need the footprint of literally the footprint of just two human sized feet, right? And that like envelope that it can cover and the, you know, the amount of dexterity you can get out of that in certain applications.

You need that, right? You may not be able to retrofit an entire old warehouse where you have really narrow areas where you can't have an AMR [00:17:00] drive thru. Agreed. Or they can't do, they can't do stairs. Right. That's one of the big reasons why I've heard companies going with the quadrupeds in a lot of places because they can actually traverse stairs.

Yeah. Oh, my God and maintain their balance while they do it. Yeah. Great. Yeah. I personally think like most things there, there are applications for these tools. I don't think they're going to come out and like, replace. All the other types, and there's, just like with cobots, there's a lot of reasons and places you don't need to use a cobot just because it can.

And same thing with humanoids, but I'm a little bit annoyed with the whole poo pooing of like in traditional automation people going like, oh, this is totally unnecessary. There's no use case. Like, why is everybody doing this? I don't know. I'm interested to see like how it fits in when we get to real.

Production quantities and stuff. Clearly the VC community believes that there's something there because there's a bunch of companies getting [00:18:00] closer, continued investment. One of the things I would say I saw at a three that made me, that made it a little bit more sense to me is one of those companies has been iterating on the actuators and the mechanics that go into the robots, many, many, you know, over the years to try to make them more standardized, lower cost, because somebody made a good point.

You have like. 11 different joints in 1 arm of a humanoid versus you're looking at, like, 6 axis robots, in the industrial space. There's different trade offs and I'm sure different applications as well. Yeah. Flex has 7 axis and they're trying to replicate the human wrist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've heard for a humanoid robot, there's like, 52 axes in play.

Yeah, which is a lot of. Motion management. We probably do it beyond my, I'm good with like six to maybe eight axes and I'm out after that. I don't wanna keep track. Wow. That's why I'm like, [00:19:00]I'm hesitant to say that I believe the predictions that like by 2030 we'll have like billions of these in the market and the price point will be 10 grand.

I think that's, you know, probably a little unrealistic. But at the same time, you know, I don't know. Things are moving fast. I just don't know where we're going to get the chips to produce them all. We don't have supply chain set up for any kind of volume like that when it comes to cars or robots or anything.

So, I think a lot of people making the predictions, maybe don't know the realities behind actually building the stuff. Manufacturers have to manufacture the stuff that we use to manufacture more stuff. I personally don't have a ton of experience with the, with AMRs. I know Courtney out of the three of us works with them probably the most.

Great. But would you see that SVT Robotics would extend into All other types of robots or are you pretty specific to the amr? We are very tech agnostic You know, we kind of operate in all different verticals. Whether it's 3pl whether it's [00:20:00] manufacturing food and beverage retail b2b So we are kind of all over it really we're at the end of the day We're just helping people connect all different systems.

A lot of people even come to us with homegrown systems You know that need help with adding new technology. They have an old, old system. So, we are completely flexible as long as we can get those end points to build the soft bots or the, adapters, like I call them, that's really all that matters is just so it can communicate to everything else running within your four walls.

So open to like right here, we have an auto bagger. We have high robotics and ASRS. On that side, there's a modular, vertical, VLM. Let's see what else. Tons of AMRs. And then we of course have the arms. So, OSARO, right hand, ready, robotics. I'm sure you guys know about. Yep. But tech agnostic, we really don't care what kind of solution.

 When someone comes to us with a problem statement, we'll give introductions to all the partners on the platform and really find what's best for them. Okay. Yeah. And I guess if a customer comes in and has. Piece of equipment or a robot on their floor that isn't [00:21:00] in your partner ecosystem. How do you handle that easy?

 It's actually people come to us all the time. Like, hey, we really want to tap in. You have all these connections to manufacturing enterprise systems or warehouse management systems and really the team of solution architects start to build that out with them. And really kind of leans in on level of effort to build things that we're seeing in the market on, Hey, this might be beneficial for your API.

 And then we go from there, building softbots takes like four to six weeks right now. So we're turning over them really quick. A WMS is a little bit longer, but we have a great team here. That's a factory. That's just. Building soft bots, testing and deploying regularly. For those of us that don't know, what does WMS stand for?

A warehouse management system. Okay. Yeah. So is that your main, is that your main, customer base is like manufacturing that involves warehouses because you guys should be inside of like hospitals and like schools. And just a lot of places where a human should be able to, I don't know, interact with this thing that's kind of helping monitor, like, you should watch kids with this [00:22:00] thing.

Yeah. Um, behind you. That would be crazy if I could get it a little, so we could get some monitoring into the kids, what's going on right there. Or alerting, like you said, alerting and support. Yes. Public safety is what I'm talking about. Yeah. But, we are, of course, hospitals and the healthcare market is a huge space that needs a lot of help.

You know, can you imagine the amount of systems that they have and software, you know, let alone some of the automation that's getting added to. So absolutely. That's a space we're playing in. But when you think about three PLS. Three third party logistics companies. Typically, they're running a lot of different software.

 A couple different WMS is under one roof, and they are typically very forward thinking. So they're wanting to try out the latest and greatest technologies, whether it's an A. M. R. Picking robot, a palletizer de palletizer case picking, you know, the big problems. And again, the label labor shortages of why they're automating.

Yeah, do you know Kevin Lawton in the new Warehouse podcast? Kevin has been to SVT [00:23:00]before, big fan, he, uh, says warehouses are sexy. So, yeah, that's his tagline. So, yeah, still Kevin. But, you know, the big part about SVT is not just, of course, connecting it all, but like, the big part is the monitoring visibility into your health of your systems running the alerting and support again.

So your team is not taking crazy calls and no longer is it he said, she said game and hours and hours of trying to triage code, which you guys know is a real pain. Is there anyone outside of like Amazon that's doing this? Like cra like has just a lot of AMRs to do what they need to do? Or can you even say who can do that stuff?

We're, we're, we're in a really, you can't say Yeah, tell, yeah. I, I can't really, there's, there's, you know, competition is good. Of course people are, but you could say are trying, they do it . Yes. Yes. People. There are others in this space. Exactly. Probably. [00:24:00] My prediction, scope of this, like how many AMR is like, are some of these companies putting Courtney, I haven't looked up in a while, but like how many robotics companies are out there right now, you know, like, it's truly insane.

You guys just came from a three. I mean, you guys must have been like, yeah, you know, um, they're coming from all over the world now too, you know, so it's like, it's, uh, it's going to be crazy to see. That's honestly what I love about my job. The most is seeing the new emerging tech that's coming. Whether here in the US, which, of course, I'm, I'm for, but also that's coming from overseas.

That's had success. Yeah, I bet. That's a, that's a fun place to be in the partner ecosystem to get to kind of see what's coming down the pike from all the partners. Definitely. Yeah, I know. I met somebody from auto motors last time when we were in Kentucky. Awesome. Yep. Yeah. They're obviously Rockwell now.

So it's interesting to see kind of what's happening in the space. I actually want to throw up, I have not been paying too good attention to the comments and a lot of them when they come in and it [00:25:00]just says LinkedIn user, I'm like, I don't know who to attribute it to. But I think you have some fans here, Melissa.

Go Morgan. Thanks for joining us, Paolo. We've got Megan. Yes, Megan. All, all things. Good to see you. So we've got some things, some comments about scalability and optimizing movements. And then we also have, Oh, David Turner's here. Hey, David. Good to see you. He actually was at the A3 forum with me and, is talking a little bit about the humanoids here.

 And he says the biggest takeaway from that was that they said most of the energy consumed was in calculations. Not the actual movement. So I can imagine that with that many axes, that goes on to calculate all those movements. It only takes so much current to turn over a motor. Right, right. But in this case, especially if you're going to be running AI in there, that sort of thing.

I think the company, and I won't name them because I don't remember which one it was, and I don't want to mix them together. But they had a [00:26:00] battery operated robot that with swappable batteries, but it could last about four hours, on each battery charge. So they're thinking, like, 4 hour shifts per task, and then you could potentially switch it over to a different task for the next shift, or it could go.

Maybe I don't know if it can change its own battery or have another. Robot, like, change the battery of the there's a lot of there's like opportunity charging as well, because sometimes you're going to be parked somewhere doing a task for a little bit. So if there's a charging unit there, oh, yeah, during the downtime.

Yeah, makes sense. And then we have a question for you, Morgan, as we t robotics plays a crucial role in the robotics industry. How do you see the company contributing to the broader landscape of automation and robotics? And what impact do you envision for businesses adopting these technologies? Oh, that was that was great.

 So the problem statement that we want to do, of course, is providing a consistent, repeatable way for them to scale [00:27:00] more business, more robots, whatever they're selling, whatever, you know, whatever they're, whatever they do best, faster time to go live, of course. And again, the really big thing is the data play.

Now it's, we now have all this aggregated data in our soft bot platform, like an integration layer between all the systems. And now companies can actually use that data, like in their own BI tools, you know, and actually use it for process improvements. Okay, so to me, it's the bigger play on leaving the old traditional way of doing things, custom code, direct integration, because now you have the chance to scale, you have the chance to try different things, pilot different technologies, because you have a lot more flexibility and the I.

T. Teams have a lot better handle on the systems they're supporting, and they can scale and add different things as you know, The ops team comes and says, Hey, we need to do this next year. Or we were at a three and now we want this robot. So hopefully people, you know, see that we're trying to defriction the process and get away from [00:28:00] the traditional system integrator worlds, of the old way of doing things.

Yeah, and I think all of us having touched, you know, traditional systems, integrators in one way or another over actually rally, and Courtney, I think there's some friction sometimes when people say like, oh, the old way is not good. It's not that we need systems integrators to go away. Not at all. But I think personally, for me, at least we need, we need better ways to help systems integrators get to customers and customers understand what is a good fit for them.

And then for them to execute projects with less friction. And I think there's a lot of room for improvement and a lot of the processes that systems integrators have to go through to get their job done as well as the customer. Right. And we treat everything like it's custom. Yeah. And we need to stop doing that.

Agree. Not just for us. Like, obviously we get more money if we. Charge you start from scratch, but we also can do a lot more jobs for more customers if we [00:29:00] do it faster So really you don't have to lose by doing it faster. You can do more work Right and then not piss people off. And so they kind of want that most important about You guys should put do you have any offshore?

AMRs because they should be on those rigs and on boats That would be on airplanes Cause we do have basically like, I know manufacturing has a skills gap and we don't have people to work, but like it's in every, everything, so cooking robots and you know, I've seen those AMRs inside of like a hot pot.

Of course. In like San Diego. Yep. So it had a cat face. Maybe that was, I don't know which one that was. That's Pudu. I think that's how you say it. And he brings, or she brings you napkins. But like, yeah, like we. We are going to see more of that in society, but we also, it's not like we're trying to take those jobs.

There's no one's taking them. No one is going to, there's not 13 [00:30:00] people that are applying for your server job. There's nobody applying for your server job. So it's not like we're, it's not the way it sounds. Some people are kind of getting You know, I guess offended, whatever, because I don't really understand what they're hearing.

But URG sells one called Plato. And, in our, from what I've seen so far, it's the robots helping the server bring the food out. So your servers that you do have are not quitting their job because their job sucks for how much work they have to do and how understaffed they are. The robots just helping them carry this massive amount of food around.

That's great. Like these people need their milkshakes. Yeah. These people need napkins. Go do it. Yeah. Ali, you touched on something that was really important before. So in the world that I've understood of all the way of traditional way is everyone's been coding to optimize to leave the project, you know, like leave the project.

No one's optimizing for the future [00:31:00] flexibility. So the system integrators are now coming around to SVT and we have some great partners now that have been trained up on the platform and actually using it as a tool set. Which has been really great to see kind of that turn now, of them being really excited about how fast they can help their customers and then they can do projects and phases because they don't have to do the software at the same time of the A.

M. R. of the picking robot as the I. O. T. devices, whatever is going in. So that's been really great to see to those clearly benefits both the end user and integrators. Yep. And the partner scale. Yeah. Do you do you see, like, as the company grows, it will continue to serve both or do you think it will be more of a tool for integrators who already kind of are playing around in that pool?

So to speak, I see it definitely for more, software integrators to take advantage of it. You know, I think they're buried in work. The lack of resources out there is crazy. And really, we just want to reduce the burden, you know, when it comes to adding new solutions. Yes. [00:32:00] And, we've gone through a crazy few years with market changes.

Like, who knows what the next five years will bring? So the flexibility is so key. And the it burden is absolutely there. The amount of it technical debt out there. I know you guys all see it. It's crazy. Yeah. So, we have a systems integrator here in the audience, David Turner, who, he said, yes, modular and quick deployment as semi custom is better for everyone.

How does a systems integrator that wants to get trained on your system get in touch with you guys? They can absolutely. Morgan at SVTRobotics. com, happy to help them out. So really what's happening right now, they're coming into the Experience Center, and we're training them on how to build soft bots, how to configure them, even make their own, and then they can go out and actually deploy on the edge or in the cloud.

So both ways are options for end customers. Yeah, so they're coming in and they're spending a couple days with the team. We will have an SVT University official program coming out in 2024. So I'll keep you [00:33:00] guys posted on that. And hopefully some pretty cool events down here in Norfolk, Virginia. And of course, you three have an open invite anytime.

So, now that I'm seeing a little taste of it back there, not that I wasn't interested before, but, would love to make it out. Um, especially if we could combine it with some training. Um, absolutely. Yeah. Megan wants to chime in. I don't think customers and restaurants want all robotic service.

The human to human connection is still important. I think you're 100 percent right. Like, I love that robot. That's at our favorite sushi place. Yes. It brings the desserts. Sometimes it brings orders. They have an all you can eat model so you can order as many times as you want. But like small dishes. So those servers are just constantly bringing stuff out.

And that little robot helps like it brings, I would say maybe a quarter of the food that would like come to our table has been brought by that robot. But then every time there's a birthday, the robot shows up to the birthday table and plays the happy birthday song with the happy birthday dessert on it.

[00:34:00] Right. And my kids love that thing, but would I want to only be served by that? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think, like, conveyor belt sushi was one of the earliest, restaurant concepts. Motivation, yeah. Specifically delivering your food to you. Right. There was a restaurant in Seattle that, I don't know, was this still around when you came?

Blue Sea Sushi. Allie, did you ever eat there? No, but I'm thinking, like, at least your drinks should be served, maybe the bartender is busy. Yeah. And that, sometimes a bartender takes a long time to bring you drinks, so, yeah, like, your server's gonna do what they need to do, but maybe this thing brings you part of it, like that, like your desserts or your drinks type of thing.

For your consideration, though, drinks are significantly harder to have in motion. Yeah, can we put them in sippy cups? Yeah, mind your acceleration and deceleration before you end up serving the drink in a not so that's funny, not so nice. I think it's a [00:35:00] concept. It was like I saw a video from the university, but they developed a system that self levels and they were just like holding drinks and it's like, put a drink on a gimbal.

Yeah. Yeah. So that'll make its way into server robots. I'm sure. Once that academic stage somehow makes it into commercialization, it is actually happening for years of unrealistic demo videos that like all those social media, like whatever channels will put out like cool engineering. And I'm like, Oh, this looks great.

And then, wait, it's five years now. Where is this thing? It never made it. It never made it. It died, yeah. And it, it would be cool, like, I feel like we should have disclaimers on things like that. Like, this is a concept only. This does not exist. You cannot buy this anywhere. So I have another question.

That robot behind you, what's the concept behind there? Because it doesn't have its own arms, so it can't pick parts. But it could stand next to [00:36:00] someone that requests and type things in and whatever, and then take it away where it needs to go. So how does that? How does that thing work? So pretend like this is a big warehouse behind me, tons of rack.

 So Locust specifically does, like zone pick, zone picking. So they have people standing in different zones and the Locust bots come to them and what's Those are is like how they're programmed with all the inventory is it kind of goes right to the like section of where you need to be picking that object pops up on the screen typically shows you which side it is quantity and you just scan it and put it in the bin and it's like onto the next one.

So they're picking you can use them for picking you can use them for replenishment as well. So again. Think of back in the day with people with their Excel sheets, a push cart, you know, their hands are full, their pencils. And then if something's out of inventory, they have to let their supervisor know.

So these things are so smart. And really the thing that really wows me is the training aspect. So [00:37:00] it takes about 15 minutes to train on like a locust or a six driver systems, bot where voice picking or vision picking takes a lot longer. So, you know, as far as like a third party logistics company or a company that has to use temp labor, for peak season, you know, they don't have all day to train.

They don't have weeks. And unfortunately it's a high turnover job. So that 15 minutes of training is critical and it gets them out, you know, picking orders, which is huge. Yeah. My brother in law works in a warehouse and he's like the longest tenured person there now. And he hasn't been there all that long.

Show up like first week, like they'll have a 50 percent dropout rate of the new hires in the first week. And at that kind of pay level, like they're not going to give you a two weeks. They just no show. And it's the sad truth. Um, temp, it's been really hard for all those companies. And then they compete against each other too, you know, and then really when they're offering a job, it's like, oh, it's unskilled labor for warehouse.

Right. Of course, people [00:38:00] are going to chase the dollar, 2 higher per hour pay. Because it's essentially the same job and you're telling them they're interchangeable. They're not valuable in my other way, other than you're a body there and can you, meet the metrics or whatever. Right. That's a tough level of jobs like to keep people at all to me, you know, everyone wants everything at their fingertips, but they're not thinking like, where is this coming from?

You know, and those jobs are dirty jobs, but it's how the country is running right now. So it's kind of like, everyone needs to wake up and be like, this is how it like, this is the new normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I brought up like these robots being on like ships One of the dirtiest jobs from another podcast I found was like squid fishing.

Oh, yeah, I really just need They really just need robots on there with these people, right? Oh my god, there's probably some jobs fishing. Oh my god gross fishing. Yeah, I don't know it's No, well, it's just, yeah, they're not very [00:39:00] high crews and they just, they, I guess when you kill a squid, it smells like pee, it's just a very miserable job, um, very like, you know, laboring.

Cause like these squid can be up to 200 pounds. Oh, wow. And they're deep sea and like, you haven't seen land and that goes to you know, being a sailor. But I watched some stuff about squid fishing, and I'm just like, okay, well, we can put robots on there. We got to save people from doing that.

Oh my god, there's so many jobs where we really need a robot to be doing that. Yeah, because it's so wrong to be making people do that gross. We teach people to fix the robots because I know they need money. We got we still need to feed the people but like oh my god These jobs are so horrible. Yeah, i'm seeing a lot of robot technician jobs coming out You know that you don't need a degree which is great and I hope more certificates come out like that For trade schools, you know, so i'm really excited to see that svt is very involved with Like community level of robotics clubs and STEM clubs.

And we are [00:40:00] true believers. Like you guys, Allie, I love your, what you've done with the kids for kids. I love the coloring book. I can't wait to get some for my nieces. That was a great idea, Nikki. Thank you. You guys crushed it. You're definitely getting an order for May and maybe I'll just have some here for when we get some younger middle school girls in.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I got to put something together and like have it printed. One of our community members, Hank. Yeah, I think he just went and printed them out immediately for his daughters and said I posted a picture. He's like, Oh, they're coloring it tonight. And a few other people were like, Oh, how can I get it in print?

Yeah, go open it. This is the second time being a parent. He has adult children. Yeah. And so they did it again, like girls that he adopted. Anyone who can do that again is just Thank you for spreading that love. Like, thank you. Well, another thing that he has coming up, This is his 40th year, as a master tradesman.

And [00:41:00] so he's going to start producing some content, like things that he's learned in his career and stuff like that. So if anybody isn't following Hank Pruim and his hashtag junior board of directors, highly recommended guys that are, you know, not the youngest guys are taking our advice. A lot of our advice and just doing the thing, doing the thing.

And we need it so desperately. We need it so bad. We need their advice. We need to know like how did they get here because we don't have that Yeah, I mean, you know, we're I'm, not 40 yet so like I consider myself like, you know, older , like I'm not, I'm not gen, we, we, I'm not Gen Z. We're into middle, middle aged, I think, yeah.

Is the correct term. We're not Gen Z, but we not gen, you know? Yeah. But we're not the boomers either, and we need these boomers to tell us how to not like let the rest of the world down with the way that we built this stuff. Don't let us die out here. We're trying our [00:42:00] best, but we need people like Hank to let whatever else they can, like, go for that tribal knowledge to someone ideally because then it will not die.

More people can find it. You don't have to be a whiz at social media or content. Just get what you know out there. And then if you want some help from someone to get it into more places, there's And our generation's doing it. We're doing it. We're like, we're gonna put everything out there. But we don't know everything.

We're not the boomer. We need more of the knowledge. Yeah, there's still stuff we don't know anything about. And the ones with the knowledge are like waiting until they can Yeah, in my mind, I'm like, do it bad. It's we need it badly enough that just start off bad and then make it pretty later. You know, you guys older than me, please a desperate plea to all the experts out there.

And whether you're an expert or not, if you have experience, you are an expert. Yeah. Something [00:43:00] You know something that somebody else doesn't know, please share it. It doesn't matter how, or where. We don't actually believe that we know everything. We don't fully acknowledge that we don't, and we want you to teach us.

We're teachable, teach us. Nowhere near, nowhere near that. But like, yeah, exactly. I'm going to share everything I can, but I can only share like, what? 20 percent of what I'm supposed to be able to share for you? Like, I only did 10 years. Before I try to go do a business. I'm not I'm not any kind of delusion where I think that I know everything that I needed to know there's so much more.

I'll learn for the rest of my life, but I'll give my people what I have. But I'm going out there and finding people like John Pillar who can who's older than me who can help, you know, teach my people what to do. And that's actually Yeah, I mean, and even him, like, he's only in his 40s. So, like, what about the 50s and the 60s, guys?

 We need you bad. Bring about a retirement. Yeah, yeah. So, it does matter. Yeah. [00:44:00] Morgan, do you see the SVT Robotics platform kind of help with that, like, institutional knowledge, taking it from individual systems, integrators or operators hands and putting it into a platform where it can Scale or replicate or absolutely.

That's really what we're going for this year is really trying to scale and and really allow easy, like automate deploying of automation for everybody. No matter like what vertical you're in or you know what you need help with with connectivity with different systems. And then the monitoring aspect really doesn't matter.

You know what you're looking for. Yeah. So let's I'm gonna go back to David Turner. Ask a question. Um, oh, yeah, this initially, but can you clarify what you mean exactly by soft bot? Yeah, I don't know. It's different from a robot. Good. Good question, David. So a soft bot is a tech agnostic. Free built connector developed from an O.

E. M. S. A. P. I. Uh, that's deployed on the platform to help you understand [00:45:00] what a soft, but does it normalizes data, enables rapid communication and provides like multi point communication to talk to different system software robots. Yeah, exactly. The software portion of the robot. You know, it's like a digital twin.

I keep hearing that term come up now. Is it like kind of the same video? It's actually software video and I may be wrong, but I'm envisioning it as like a little robot that runs between like the robot that's on the floor, right? Which is your OEM product and whatever system is above that. So it's like a little runner in a restaurant that's helping bring stuff.

To like from one robot to whatever layer it needs to be communicating to it's passing data spot is kind of the gateway run between one little robot and the other things and go back and keeping the restaurant theme going. Am I right? No, it's like you're spot on. It's actually just like [00:46:00] the data pieces.

It's just passing the data that it needs from the other systems. You know, so translation. So that is a gateway. Almost there. You go. There you go. It's a gateway for all your robots. A trend, like, you can think of it like that talk integration layer and normalization layer. Um, you know, and like, why would you use a soft bot?

Because it's reusable. It's self documenting and it's easy to support. And of course, the big thing is it's they're fast to deploy. And that's what it's all about is you don't have to think about, I want to do this robot. It's going to take a year. No, it can happen in weeks to months. Now. What do you tell a softball?

Do you tell it like what? Your end pieces. So like your last robot and then what your new software, like, yeah, what do you tell the softbox? So these guys back here, they're looking, they're trying to find PIC tasks. Like they're waiting for like waves from a WMS, like a warehouse management system to come down and they're like waiting, like for those PIC tasks to go do their missions.

Yeah. So those are like the end points or, you know, the data that like those are [00:47:00] taking from another system. So yeah, really cool. It is cool. So we got our friend David here. Hey, David. Nice to see you. He says, I'm sorry. He's sorry. He's late. Uh, he said, I heard there's a big problem with switching between different robots and their platforms.

Like, if you use a cougar and then switch to another brand, you have issues with the platform that controls it 100%. And I think there's multiple different solutions out there for like, one overlay that will allow you to program all the robots in the same language. Um, do you guys touch that part as well, or is that different from, from your system?

Spot on with the software. Like I, like I said at the beginning, no two APIs speak the same language. My favorite question is, how well do you play with others, you know? And they don't, they're designed not to work together. But the world we're living in is that one robot can't do it all. Yeah. So they have to learn to play nice together.

And that's really the SVT bridge. Um, is we're allowing them to communicate, although they don't even know they're communicating to each other, [00:48:00] which is mind blowing because they're just talking to the platform and the platform sends the messages to, okay, you need to go here. You need to go there. So it's really been great to see, but he makes them.

Yeah, he makes a really good point on it is difficult. Traditionally to switch your software to add a different piece of technology But when you have svt that simplicity is all built in because again, you're not custom code It's not super brittle the jenga tower of code is not going to fail on you and it makes it easy for businesses to change.

 And adopt new technology Yeah, are there any A. M. R. S. You haven't integrated into being able to use S. V. T. with it? Or have you trying to got after everything that is an A. M. R. out there? We have not gone after them all right now. It's kind of like a opportunity based or, you know, who really wants to be on the platform.

What is the market telling us as far as, you know, what do we need to solve this year? Uh, Picking, packing, and I would [00:49:00] say, the ASRS is, automated storage and retrieval systems are really hot right now. So that's been a big focus. And of course, uh, the software side of things on the warehouse, warehouse management systems.

Yeah, so one of the things I learned, I guess, recently is like, there are applications for AMRs in logistics and then similar but different applications for AMRs inside manufacturing facilities doing material handling for raw materials going to a station or semi finished goods moving to the next process and those are also material handling, but they, I think, use very different Yeah.

Yeah. Software systems to control them. You've got warehouse management on one side, which is why I guess I wasn't so familiar with WMS That's okay. It was my guess, but I know a lot of people listen to the show. They may not know specific acronyms So i'm trying to get better about yeah Just in case great point.

 So the amrs and like ali's a world, you know in manufacturing They are listening for transport tasks. So they're bringing like Maybe like different items to a [00:50:00] kidding station, you know, and then once it's done, you know, that person can hit an I. O. T. button and then it can take it to the next spot.

So they're doing a lot of transporting. And that way workers there don't have to kill themselves pushing pallets around or, you know, they can just focus on the tasks at hand. And I see a lot that a lot of that in the kidding and manufacturing, just moving product around. But I suppose An A. M. R. can be used for both types of applications.

Absolutely. Maybe the system that controls it will be different. Uh, correct. You guys work across either application either vertical. Yep. We, uh, we have a lot of manufacturing customers as well as, you know, supply chain and warehousing customers. Um, and then healthcare, like, you nailed it as another 1.

Um, so. Really a lot of options right now. We've just been very focused cause the 3PL seemed to need the most help. But like I said, there's enough SVT to go around for everybody. Especially since it being a software platform, you were not exactly. supply chain constrained like the hardware manufacturers are.

Yes. Right. Very cool. [00:51:00] Something that I'm kind of new ish to now and last year is working with mobile manipulators. So it's an A. M. R. with a six axis arm on top of it. So those things can do obviously a lot of stuff in warehouse or manufacturing. What I'm looking at more is manufacturing and raw materials handling like Nikki was describing.

Right? Um, but yeah. In my past lives, everything is tied to the same network and it makes it very easy for me to talk to everything. And now I have this, completely disconnected AMR that I can only communicate with wirelessly. And I'm having to look at a whole new set of products and, I have to talk to, you know, CNCs and elevators and all kinds of different stuff that's just kind of new to me.

So just curious as, as far as like that kind of thing goes, you already have customers that are using. Like an arm to talk to a C and C and also the elevator and, you know, what kind of products do you use to just tie everything to the same network? Yeah. So, like I said, the soft bot does that as long as there's like those [00:52:00] API endpoints that I was referring to to kind of all work together.

But that application that you're talking about is I'm seeing it as well with the mixed case palette, you know, or take, you know. Actually building cases, of all different kinds, so when you think about, an arm on top of an AMR, you know, building that those cases or, you know, deep palletizing as well, taking things off a conveyor.

So those things are definitely, Courtney need a lot of help. So, SVTs is really, you know, trying to branch on all sides, and help technologies really go faster and like find gaps too, with their software. That's really cool. I have lots of conversations to have with you offline now. I'm excited. I guess I know we're getting close to time are what's the next show you guys are going to?

 I will be at MODX and I was just curious if anyone's walking MODX in Atlanta. Cool, Courtney. I'm exhibiting at MODX. Come check out our booth. Looking forward to it. So we'll be doing some shout outs for that. I've been asked repeatedly if I'm going to MODX. I do not plan on being there, but Courtney will be there on behalf of [00:53:00] Automation Ladies.

I'll be FaceTiming you with Courtney. All right, I think what we have coming up next for myself, I'm actually next week going to Austin to speak at the industrial marketing summit, which is pretty exciting because it's like kind of the first one in our industry, that I've seen that's been put together.

That has multiple different groups, not just like 1 publishing company doing a conference for their users. Industrial marketing. I'm not a marketer. Um, so I'm like, I guess tap me because I do marketing without being a marketer. I don't really know. And we all are on the side. Right? Right. And I think, you know, that's one of the things about just if you're willing to come out and be public and talk about what you do.

Hey, that's a form of marketing. You can call it employee or user generated marketing, but it's out there. So that'll be fun. There's a lot of people from the industry. I know that are going to be there. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks everyone. And then we, I am going to that Traceroute Con also, which is, Josh Varghese's training.

And I know there's, I think we're going to do a [00:54:00] live episode or maybe not live, but we'll record an episode with Caitlin Young, while we're on site. And as far as other shows, I think, so this will actually be a big deal. Automation Ladies will be at the Assembly Show South in Nashville. Nice. And we're going to have a booth.

It'll be our first time having an Automation Ladies Lounge at a show. And if we find that to be fun and successful, we might be doing that at other shows going forward. I am so excited to follow your adventures. Thank you. But you let us know where you guys are going to be at MODX. Absolutely. We'll make sure to, you and Courtney collab on something and maybe we can send some interested people your way that are here or maybe that see this later.

That can come see some of your stuff in person. So we'll throw that question right back to you for the our last couple of minutes What do you have going on? Uh coming up that we should pay attention to and where can people find you and follow you and get in touch with you Uh, they will work with you So, check out svtrobotics.

com [00:55:00] and, my email's morganatsvtrobotics. com. Really easy to check out on LinkedIn. And really what I want to tell people is why should you leverage the SVT platform is we are the only tech agnostic platform right now, really. For supply chain, it teams to help integrate monitor and scale automation.

So that's really what I want to leave everybody with. SVT will have a presence at manifest. We'll have a presence at Modex. So I would love to see you guys all there, uh, keep in touch. And honestly, Nikki and Courtney, it's always such a pleasure to catch up with you guys. You are awesome mentors for women and I'm huge fans, and I can't wait to continue to watch you guys grow this thing.

Thank you so much Morgan. Thanks for coming on and we look forward to seeing you soon for sure. See you guys soon. Thanks y'all Take care