It could actually
realise if you’re
in a bad mood.
Then it could
crack a joke, just
to lighten things
up or it could do
a little dance or
something.
changing habits because as long as there’s a
human there you’re going to go to a branch
and say ‘can you do this for me or can I pay
you? Or could you disconnect my electricity?’
What DEWA wants to do is use the
technology that’s in the stores so eventually
you start doing it off your mobile app and
you don’t come in anymore. It needs to get
you in the habit for that. a Machine Learning system, or an AI system, it
could actually realise if you’re in a bad mood.
Then it could crack a joke, just to lighten things
up or it could do a little dance or something.
What form does your training take? The most basic thing is it needs to solve a
problem. We have to understand what the
For the various things on the software side,
most of these robots work on Python. So
it’s programming the Python language so
you understand the way the robots work
because it’s not only the software processors
or the transaction processors that are in
there. The robot could speak to you in a
monotone voice but if you want it to move
a bit and you want some emphasis then you
need to program all of that.
You’ve got 150 sensors in the robot. It’s
also a question of being able to enable and
use the right sensor at the right time.
For example, you have something called
a mood mirror. Basically this is sentiment
analysis. So you can be talking to the robot
and it could realise whether you are happy
or not happy. Because it starts to recognise
certain patterns and if you start linking this to
Its focus is on investing
in customer happiness
centres or branches
and it doesn’t want any
humans in them.
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When you take this into the market
and, for instance, you’re trying to
sell the robot to a bank; how do you
do that? Do you just explain how the
robot can interact with customers?
problem is. What we’re starting to see a
lot more with our police enterprise clients
is they are going through design thinking
workshops in any case and out of these they
start identifying a lot of the pain points. This
identifies the different things that could be
done better.
When someone walks into a bank
and they see the robot, what sort of
reactions are people giving to it?
I think it’s sort of like a cross section that you
have in the country where you have people
of all levels and all types. Some people love
it, some people hate it, you’re going to have
that. But I think the one thing is we are in a
fairly progressive society, Dubai has been a
society of influencers and thought leaders
and I think the rest of the region looks at it to
see what has been happening.
I think from a bank perspective, when
one bank does it the others start looking and
saying ‘what could we be doing and how can
we get the edge over the other guy?’