[ I’ve worked with some of the very large warehousing companies mentioned, but not recently ]
For restaraunt use, picking packaged units from a pallet or storage area to bring to “ready-use” shelves is NOT very time-consuming, most don’t have a dedicated employee for it. Unpacking to line-use containers and refilling the common open supplies would be a big savings, but it’d have to have more flexibility and use less space when not active than current solutions have before it’s anywhere near competitive with humans on practical grounds, regardless of cost.
For smaller places, employees are not fractionally employable, and tasks are not very well standardized, so once you need people around, you may as well have them do most of the work.
The big question is when multimodal LLM and “AI” gets good enough to put into automation that is general-purpose enough to handle exceptions well. Putting something back after it falls, minor self-maintenance, incorrect shipments recieved, refilling a busy ingredient bin, etc. are all things that humans are currently required for, and are the large part of employment costs for smaller businesses.
So, the reason I was talking about time savings is because I was trying to make a point about automation in general, but for picker robots in restaurants specifically, the bigger advantage might be space savings from taller and denser shelves in expensive areas like NYC.
This is an important consideration. If things can be stored more densely and still quickly accessible, that’s a huge improvement. Inventory accuracy can be improved quite a bit with automation as well, allowing a business to store less not-yet-needed stuff.
Another counter-force, though, is that small businesses (and the smarter large ones) are VERY nervous about the fragility of complex systems that don’t have simple human fallback mechanisms. JIT inventory means downtime if a supplier misses a delivery, and hyperdense storage means a LOT more human effort (or downtime if we haven’t prepared for it and have the humans on-call) when the internet’s out or a staff member broke the robot’s arm trying to teach it to dance or whatnot.
[ I’ve worked with some of the very large warehousing companies mentioned, but not recently ]
For restaraunt use, picking packaged units from a pallet or storage area to bring to “ready-use” shelves is NOT very time-consuming, most don’t have a dedicated employee for it. Unpacking to line-use containers and refilling the common open supplies would be a big savings, but it’d have to have more flexibility and use less space when not active than current solutions have before it’s anywhere near competitive with humans on practical grounds, regardless of cost.
For smaller places, employees are not fractionally employable, and tasks are not very well standardized, so once you need people around, you may as well have them do most of the work.
The big question is when multimodal LLM and “AI” gets good enough to put into automation that is general-purpose enough to handle exceptions well. Putting something back after it falls, minor self-maintenance, incorrect shipments recieved, refilling a busy ingredient bin, etc. are all things that humans are currently required for, and are the large part of employment costs for smaller businesses.
So, the reason I was talking about time savings is because I was trying to make a point about automation in general, but for picker robots in restaurants specifically, the bigger advantage might be space savings from taller and denser shelves in expensive areas like NYC.
This is an important consideration. If things can be stored more densely and still quickly accessible, that’s a huge improvement. Inventory accuracy can be improved quite a bit with automation as well, allowing a business to store less not-yet-needed stuff.
Another counter-force, though, is that small businesses (and the smarter large ones) are VERY nervous about the fragility of complex systems that don’t have simple human fallback mechanisms. JIT inventory means downtime if a supplier misses a delivery, and hyperdense storage means a LOT more human effort (or downtime if we haven’t prepared for it and have the humans on-call) when the internet’s out or a staff member broke the robot’s arm trying to teach it to dance or whatnot.