Queueing – that greatest, and most shuffling of British traditions – is doomed.
Elram Goren, co-founder and CEO of CommonSense Robotics, is responsible. His company, which builds robots and artificial intelligence systems for urban micro-fulfilment centres, is dedicated to cracking the one hour delivery problem. How do you get products - and particularly groceries - to consumers more quickly and for less money than a trip to the local grocers?
“What we’re doing is quite simple,” Goren says. “To bring these very large fulfilment centres, that you probably know from companies like Amazon and usually take [up] thousands or millions of square feet, and to compress those into very small facilities that can support high-capacity on-demand operations.”
Goren’s idea isn’t that complicated: take online shopping as we know it, and make it go faster. It’s takeaway for ingredients. It’s takeaway for whatever you want. Micro-fulfilment centres could be tucked away in underground car parks or in the basements of city-centre office blocks, moving distribution from out-of-town to right next to where people live.
Two years ago, Goren pitched his then nascent startup at WIRED Retail 2015. This year, he was back at WIRED Retail speaking on the main stage. In 2015, the company was barely a company at all: a wireframe concept on top of a promise that CommonSense Robotics could do away with the labyrinthine warehouses that feed consumer juggernauts such as Amazon with compact, distributed stockpiles manned by efficient robots that load orders into boxes and ship them across cities to wherever they need to be. Ideally, in under an hour.
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“In late 2015, CommonSense Robotics had a huge team of four,” Goren says. “Four founders with no funding. Today, we’re more than 50 people. We’ve built the technology from the ground up that allows us to make these micro-fulfilment centres and to secure the first clients. We’re gearing up towards the first deployment for our on-demand micro-fulfilment centre.”
Groceries are a particular problem area for online shoppers. Goren explains that most supermarkets currently make a small loss on online grocery delivery. He wants to turn that into a profit.
“The best candidates are retail segments where volumes are very large, like groceries or health and beauty,” Goren says. “They’re the ones that we’re focusing on today. You could see ordering on-demand as a luxury, but I think it’s also a question of how we frame this. Instead of going to the supermarket and spending your time and money driving and shopping there before driving all the way back, if you could get those same groceries at the same quality at lower prices and faster than you can go to the supermarket and get home, would you still go to the supermarket?”
Maybe not. But that question deserves the obvious follow-up: if everything from the bakery aisle tongs to the checkout staff are replaced choreographed troupes of tireless robots, what happens to the supermarket? And if Goren’s robot army is unleashed upon the whole high street, isn’t that the death knell for butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers alike?
“Not necessarily,” he says. “People enjoy the experience of going to a shop - that’s something that people will still want to experience in real life. There are a few ways that we can imagine retail evolving. Most of these brick and mortar retailers have a lot of real estate. Actually, today they have too much. And one of the things we’re trying to do is think about how to use this real estate and turn it from a liability to an asset. You don’t need to build massive facilities to use this type of technology. You basically don’t need to build any facilities; you can buy these on-demand services from [other] companies and use it as you would use the Cloud. So, in that sense, this allows any shop of any type and size to play in this game.”
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Simply put: the need for every shop to house its own inventory is over. If the bread aisle runs out of bread, summon the robot re-stocking van. But the applications of CommonSense Robotics’ technology don’t stop on the high street.
“We’re in the business of moving things faster,” Goren says. “What we’re basically building are the logistics that allow things to move faster and more cheaply within cities. And we’re doing that by building a new type of supply chain – and that’s not necessarily limited to retail. The first-world is a way in. But moving goods within cities faster while saving on space and being more efficient in the resources you use is something that’s relevant for New York and San Francisco and London. We’re not very focused on developing countries today, but in a more general way it’s like asking if building better technologies for autonomous cars is only a first-world thing, or if it’s more than that. A reasonable answer would be that it’s more than first-world, but it is probable that it will be used in [first-world countries] earlier than other places – unless there are applications that we’re not aware of... such as building a warehouse for emergency hospitals.”
In the next two years Goren’s goal for CommonSense Robotics is to have the company’s (and the world’s) first city hooked up to the company’s micro-fulfilment centre network. “In the next few months, we’re planning to build the first facilities,” he says. “But in two years time, our plan is to enter a major city and to deploy their micro-fulfilment network; not just one facility, but a network. That will allow any type of retailer of any size to use on-demand services and be able to compete with these huge retailers that dominate the market.
“If we’re able to do that in two years, I’ll be quite happy.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
