Daniel Diez, Chief Strategy Officer of Agility Robotics, emphasised the company’s mission to address the growing labour shortage with its humanoid robots.
“Right now, in the US alone, there are over a million unfilled positions in materials handling. These are repetitive, injury-prone jobs with high absenteeism and turnover. Humanoid robots with two legs and two arms are a great fill for that massive labour gap that keeps growing,” Diez explained in a conversation with CNBC-TV18 at the Web Summit in Qatar.
Agility Robotics’ flagship humanoid robot, Digit, is already making an impact in industrial settings. Diez noted that Digit is the only commercially available humanoid robot actively performing tasks in the workforce. “We’ve got great customers like GXO, the big logistics player, and Schaeffler, a huge automotive parts manufacturer. Digit is at work in those facilities moving materials around and helping lower the cost of labour,” he said.
The company’s Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) model has made adoption easier for businesses by providing an immediate return on investment. “We examine the actual labour cost of the task we’re taking on and price our robot based on a discount of that fully burdened human labour rate. Customers see an almost instantaneous RoI because of this pricing model,” Diez added.
Beyond logistics and manufacturing, Agility Robotics sees significant potential for humanoid robots in industries such as pharmaceuticals and retail. With the introduction of a safety-certified robot by 2025, Diez believes the company will unlock new opportunities for automation. “The ability to deploy at scale is almost infinite for us,” he concluded.
Below are the excerpts of the interview.
Q: Your robot is called Digit. Could you sort of tell us how Digit is different from any other robot that’s out there in the market?
Diez: Digit is the only commercially available robot right now. It’s the only one actually doing work. So, we’ve got great customers, companies like GXO, the big logistics player, Schaeffler, a huge automotive parts manufacturer. Digit is at work in those facilities moving materials around and helping lower the cost of labour. And that is a big part of what we’re trying to accomplish here. Fill that labour gap and do it at a rate that’s competitive to what a fully burdened human would actually cost. The great thing about it is, with human labour in these areas being so scarce, companies can now choose where they want people to play a role and where they want to automate through humanoid technology.
Q: You just mentioned that you’re with players like Schaeffler etc. So, if you could sort of tell us, how are you building efficiency for these companies and how does the business model work?
Diez: I think what was really most popular is this RaaS model, robot as a service. And so, the way we price that is that, we examine the actual labour cost of the task we’re taking on, and then we price our robot based on a discount of that fully burdened human labour rate. We get up and running within a facility within a couple of days. So really what the customer is seeing is almost instantaneous RoI because of the pricing model. It works really well for Agility as far as the margins are concerned, and it’s immediately valuable to the customer.
Q: You’re looking at this RaaS model, as you said, but where do you see the future of this? Where do you see these humanoid robots being able to make a difference even going forward in other sectors? Because right now it’s backend, logistics, all of that. So where do you see this growing? What’s the future looking like?
Diez: I think logistics is an area where there’s clearly an interest and need. Manufacturing is another one. We are getting a huge amount of interest in the automotive space. Schaeffler is a good example. But the automotive manufacturers in Germany, the US and Japan also becoming large customers for Agility. The pharmaceutical industry, retail, starting with the backend but then also moving on to the floor. Safety for humanoid robots, not just Digit, but all humanoid robots is a very critical barrier to scale. Agility will be the first company to actually create a robot at the end of 2025 that can safely work near people, which means these safety cages that they work in right now disappear for us. And then the ability to deploy at scale is almost infinite for us.
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