Power Talk

July 2019

Exhibit

With Artificial Intelligence creating a buzz around itself and at a time where we have live examples where robots are identifying humans by name; there might be a day when they might prepare our meals, do our grocery shopping and what not. In a developing country like India, there are challenges to overcome and probably there is a long way to go, but the future is promising, says the founder of Invento Robotics, Balaji Viswanthan. In a quick chat with Exhibit Magazine, he tells us why!

ex: How do you think has robotics been adopted in a developing country like India?

We were quite surprised by the positive response we got overall. Initially people questioning why a labour surplus country like India would need robots. But, now many start to realise that robotics is like the PC/internet revolution that happened 25 years ago. You cannot view that from the prism of jobs alone. A number of large enterprises have been quite enthusiastic exploring various use cases for robotics with us and we have over 20 large paying enterprise customers. But, it is still an early market for robotics not just in India, by anywhere in the world.

ex: What is the estimate size of this industry like?

Robotics in factory automation, warehouses and healthcare are already matured and their market size would push in the range of $10b. The market size for service robots in retail and BFSI industries would be in the range of $1billion. But, in the next decade robotics would become a multi trillion dollar industry and similar to the PC industry we will have dozens of companies in the industry valued at $10b and above.

ex: Robotics being a mere tech enabled discovery, do you think there are major challenges? Please elucidate.