September 3, 2020
FEBRUARY 2, 2020
The advancement of robotics, combined with artificial intelligence, will revolutionise many aspects of the economy – but this will also lead to challenges for society and raises some ethical questions.
That was the heart of a debate in a session called Investing At The Intersection of Technology at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit (CAIS20), which is taking place in the Cayman Islands this week (February 6-7).
Chaired by Claire Griffin, director, KPMG, the panellists described how robotics and artificial intelligence will revolutionise certain sectors, including the rapidly growing ecommerce groceries market. Steve Toebes, chief robotics officer at HDS Global, suggested ecommerce groceries will become a $1 trillion industry.
Although this is a very fast-growing space, it is highly competitive, he noted, with many of the major players losing a lot of money. The biggest reason for this, he suggested, is a lack of efficiency in their systems.
HDS Global has developed so-called smart warehouses to change this for its customers. It has developed advanced robotics to cover every aspect of the warehouse requirements around picking and selecting food items, which is also combined with the use of artificial intelligence to create the optimum way of doing things.