CHANNEL CHIEF
As COO for Jacky’s Business Solutions, ASHISH PANJABI plays a
decisive part in taking robots from SoftBank Robotics out into the Middle
East market. Appointed as a value added reseller earlier this year, Jacky’s
helps end-users effectively deploy SoftBank’s customer-advising humanoid
robot, Pepper, in their businesses.
C
Can you explain a bit about that
process of taking the robots to the
end-users?
We have two channels: one is a direct
channel, the other is working through
reseller partners. Ideally, we’d like to work
as much as we can through the partners
because a lot of the work is the last mile in
terms of software development, software
tweaking and improvements are coming in
over the period.
Again we compare a lot of it (progress)
with the mobile app. You started off with a
mobile app 10 years ago and it was based
on a version of the web page and that
mobile app kept evolving over the period
because once you had the app you said ‘wait
a minute, can the app do this, or could I be
doing this off the mobile?’
And eventually, one by one, you start to
see more and more features as that mobile
app goes from version one to one point
one and one point two until it hits version
two and version three. Then it’s completely
different to what it was 10 years ago. So we
see a lot of this with the robots as well as
people taking it, deploying it and thinking
‘could I be doing this on it?’
For instance, in a retail store you could
use the robot as part of your catalogue. It
could be something that links to a loyalty
system that uses a camera so it could
recognise you when you walk in the store.
This could alert the store staff that
you were in the store; otherwise they only
find out after you paid. They could make
recommendations based on your history. It
also could be used to finalise a transaction.
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
Issue 19
How are governments using
the robots?
One of the best use cases we’ve got is DEWA,
the electricity and water authority. It started
with five Pepper robots and initially it took
a third-party developer. It put the robots in
branches and they were getting feedback.
DEWA also had to think what more could
the Pepper robots be doing. It got to a point
where it looked at them and said ‘can we start
developing in-house, because there is such a
long laundry list of things we think the robot
could be doing here’. It concluded that ‘it’s
more efficient if we do it in-house because we
understand what needs to be done.’
So we actually had them trained. We
had the programmers from France come in
and we held training sessions for DEWA. It’s
now fully self-sufficient and can do all the
development work in-house.
It does all of its systems; it works with
all its partners and it’s buying more robots
as well. Its focus is on investing in customer
happiness centres or branches and it doesn’t
want any humans in them. So it’s a matter of
Ashish Panjabi, COO, Jacky’s
Business Solutions
So we actually had
them trained. We had
the programmers from
France come in and we
held training sessions
for DEWA.
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