Konica Minolta (News - Alert)'s Business Innovation Center will be providing installation and maintenance for Savioke’s hospitality services robots, the companies announced today. Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. is an information management company that delivers cloud services, enterprise content, and technology optimization services.
Savioke's solution, the Relay Robot, does delivery of things like extra towels or mini bar items to hotel visitors, allowing for faster response times and freeing up hotel staff to do other things. The robot, which is in use by select Aloft Hotels in California, looks like a small, automated kitchen garbage bin.
A July 8 blog on the Savioke website reports that the robots have traversed more than 1,000 kilometers and done 4,000 deliveries to date. The company is now in the process of deploying the robots in hotels throughout the U.S.
According to a 2014 study, robots could potentially replace 10 million human beings in the British job market over the next two decades. However, Esplori CEO Federico Pistono argues that every job replaced by technology creates new jobs and new sectors.
And in discussing its Sawyer technology earlier this month Rethink Robotics President and CEO Scott Eckert noted the growing labor shortage, increasing wages, and aging society in Asia, and said Sawyer could help manufacturers be successful amid these changes.
While many of us often think of robots as cute mechanical devices that, like the Relay Robot, can perform relatively simple tasks like delivery, they also can be leveraged for more complex efforts such as data analysis.
“Senior executives across industries agree that new software ‘robots’, leveraging attributes such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and effective use of big data, will unlock significant value within the next three to five years,” Cognizant (News - Alert) said in announcing the results of a study on the future of work that it released in March.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino