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Robots are packing your presents

The Looming Robot blog
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The holiday season is a time for packing and delivering. Just ask Santa and his army of elves. But who’s really packing your presents?

If they come from an Amazon warehouse, chances are a combination of robots and workers, that’s who. And with more than a trillion boxes being shipped globally, there’s a demand for warehouse workers and robots to fill shipping-related tasks.  

Amazon, with the purchase of Kiva Systems back in 2012, which became Amazon Robotics, has already started building a robot army. Recode reports that currently “Amazon has more than 200,000 mobile robots working inside its warehouse network, alongside hundreds of thousands of human workers. This robot army has helped the company fulfill its ever-increasing promises of speedy deliveries to Amazon Prime customers.”

And that robot army is going to increase substantially. Boston Dynamics has been working on a robot named “Handle” that could potentially fill that need. According to Barron’s, Marc Raibert, founder and CEO of Boston Dynamics, who was speaking on stage at the WSJ CEO Council in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. Raibert said they’re hoping to launch it in the next 18 months.

Raibert also mentions that as more than one trillion boxes are shipped globally, there is a vast market for robots that can handle complex warehouse logistics and shipping tasks. And Handle has been designed specifically to move boxes. Its reach extends to nine feet, it can lift up to 33 pounds and both load and unload trucks and pallets at a rate of 360 boxes an hour. The company calls Handle a “mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics”.

Will robots like Handle eventually replace all of Amazon’s human warehouse workers? “Automation is in no way replacing jobs,” said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of human resources at Amazon, reports Barron’s from a follow-up session at The Wall Street Journal’s conference last week. Galetti suggests workers learn how to work in partnership with automation.

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.