How Ambi Robotics helps its customers prepare for the peak season

As Black Friday and the start of the peak season approaches, logistics providers across the country are gearing up for the rush. Each year, these suppliers could see a 25% to 40% increase in productivity, according to Stephen McKinley, co-founder and chief operating officer of Ambi Robotics.

This year, Ambi expects its customers to experience an increase of 9% to 10% compared to last year’s peak season.

“Despite everything that may be happening in the economy, volume continues to increase and e-commerce spending remains high,” McKinley said The robot report. “This puts familiar pressure on our customers to operate across all their individual sites, and we feel that pressure too, because our systems are critical to their functions.”

For Ambi, preparing for the season means installing new systems at eight facilities before the peak season begins.

“Most of these new sites are using this new version of AmbiSort, and while it’s not a new product, it’s definitely a new variant,” McKinley said. “We are excited to support this during the peak season and want to make sure everything goes perfectly, of course, for our customers.”

The Berkeley, California-based company is also working to ensure its team members are readily available to logistics customers when they need them.

“We move into a more reactive state of mind, where about half the team travels to different sites to check out what’s going on, and the other half of the team is ready to step in to fix issues as they arise,” McKinley said.

How to increase productivity without adding new systems

While some Ambi Robotics customers plan to run multiple systems during the peak season, there are other ways to increase productivity, McKinley said.

“[Customers] will often add more shifts to existing operations or bring more people to work alongside our systems, so we can help with training,” he noted. “We offer more training to customers right before the peak season to make sure they know how to use the systems effectively.”

Properly training operators who work with robots on a daily basis can make a big difference in how the system works.

“Throughout the year, we constantly monitor the performance of the systems,” McKinley said. “The performance of systems is tied to the inherent quality of that piece of machine, which doesn’t really fluctuate, but also how the customer interacts with that machine and how attentive they are to it, or how well trained the operators are. So, we can help by stepping in and making sure everyone knows what to do and has the right mindset when they approach their system.”

Ambi reduces downtime and introduces incremental improvements

Nobody wants a robot to fail, but they especially don’t want a robot to fail when it has to handle a massive increase in volume. This means that reducing downtime is even more important to Ambi Robotics right now. To do this, the company distributes spare parts to several sites.

“Normally, we would have spare supplies here at our headquarters in Berkeley and send things out as needed. These spare supplies are also what we use to create new systems,” McKinley said. “During peak seasons, we will bring in more parts and then distribute them to specific locations on the East Coast that are customer hubs.”

For example, McKinley said Cincinnati is a central area for many Ambi installations in the Midwest. “We will even go so far as to put backup computers or high-criticality backup items at each site that will carry more inventory to customer locations during peak seasons,” he continued.

When it comes to implementing improvements in its AI systems, Ambi takes a conservative approach.

“We’ve been a physical AI company since 2018, when we started. We know how important it is to have systems out there in the world that perform at predictable levels. So, we don’t have systems that self-improve over time,” McKinley said. “As we generate more data from our systems, we will use it to retrain our systems and then process the improvement through A/B testing within a controlled environment to see what happens before rolling it out to the rest of the field.”

When customers need Ambi’s help, they will always talk to a person

While it’s important to improve technology, implement new systems and add more shifts, McKinley says it’s equally important for Ambi to build trust with its customers.

“The people who will answer the phones on our support hotline are the same people who will go to the facilities, take the training and provide the solutions,” he explained. “I think that’s very important, because we’re building a layer of trust with the operators and with the people on site who have to maintain the systems in our absence, and with the management that is on site.”

“When they pick up the phone, they will recognize the voice on the other end and that person will be familiar with them,” McKinley added. “That helped build trust in a significant way. That trust was, in my opinion, the most important factor in why these large customers adopted physical AI in the real world.”

Instead of using AI to interact directly with customers, Ambi developed an AI system to help its employees solve its customers’ problems faster. This AI system also makes it easier for Ambi to onboard new employees, McKinley said.

“We’ve been working on basically collecting all the data from our support tickets and then feeding that into our AI model to assist in support. We have a very lean, very small team,” he said. “Now we have these AI assistants that help us track performance on sites, so predict when things might go wrong, and then help us as a support organization.”