What circumstances brought DaoAI company to life?
At DaoAI, we are focusing on bringing AI-driven robotics to the manufacturing industry by empowering the robots to perform tasks like bin-picking, assembly or sorting. As of 2016, the worldwide population is including more individuals over the age of 65, so there is a significant gap in the workforce. In addition to these, the younger generations are more interested in digital and service jobs rather than manufacturing ones. As a result, more and more companies are looking for alternative solutions to circumvent these shortages.
In relation to manufacturing, how do you think AI will impact the factories of the future?
Automation has been used in factories for decades already, especially in the automotive industry where they employ bigger robots, but with the help of AI we will be able to open the "eyes” of these robots and help them process individual information so as to easily adapt to more complex tasks. AI brings the intelligence in traditional automation to a new level since it can use vision information to recognize parts exactly like a human would.
Traditional automation solutions are not able to solve the emerging challenges in the manufacturing world and robots need vision to perform tasks with better accuracy. These specific activities can be compared with using a fork to pick food from a plate with your eyes closed. In order to be successful, you would need to have the food placed in the same position every time and perform the exact same movements over and over again. But, in reality, applications like part loading, car assembly or equipment installations have many parts that are not in a fixed position and thus they rely exclusively on manual labor. Luckily, AI robotics is able to step in and offer a controlled and efficient solution to all these challenges.
In which way do you believe AI solutions will spread across the globe - could there be a certain pattern of adoption?
At the moment, South Korea and China are leading the adoption for AI robotics in this sector, but the rest of the world is rapidly picking up. Even though we started the company in China, most of the brands that are using our system are from Europe or the U.S., with more than 50% of the sales coming from the automotive sector.
It is true that in underdeveloped economies, human labor is cheaper and more abundant but oftentimes it is not enough to run a successful factory. Consequently, we believe that AI solutions, which can enrich the classic machines that are being used at the moment, are going to become more of an occurrence all over the world. In the past few years, we have grown our revenue by four times and as we continue our journey, we predict we will grow at least two-fold.
What are the challenges you must surpass for these technologies to proliferate at scale?
At an internal level, we are struggling to keep a balance because we have more orders than engineers and we are constantly trying to find ways to install all the systems that are being ordered by our customers. On a large scale, AI is seen as a threat as robots are associated with replacing people and possibly taking their jobs. However, in the cold light of day we will realize that AI is extremely useful to undertake dangerous automation jobs. For example, loading parts in the welding machine can be extremely unhealthy due to the fumes resulting. Additionally, using AI is perceived as raising the costs of the whole system but, in reality, it is quite the contrary because this system is actually more generic and can have better adaptability for different tasks.
What are the main success stories the company has achieved since its inception?
We are extremely invested in all the projects that we take, but we are especially excited to have signed a framework purchase agreement with Siemens as it will evolve into a large-scale commitment where we will deliver tens of stations to their factories at once. This is an inflection point in our evolution since it could mean the beginning of mass adoption for the solutions that we offer.
What is the main appeal of AI, from your point of view, and in which way can it shape the world?
In the future, AI robots will take over the dangerous and repetitive tasks that human workers are performing at the moment, leaving them more time to focus on interesting and creative activities that fulfill their lives.
