The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:38:06 · Grace Brown
[00:38:06] S1: Aged care came up because over COVID, as you would know and many people would know, loneliness was one of the most discussed topics. Like, everyone was talking about the loneliness epidemic. The World Health Organization announced that it had similar health implications of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And so it was a topic that was just so widely discussed amongst... Globally. And when you follow the data, the people who are most affected by loneliness are older adults, and specifically older adults in aged care homes. And because Abi was built as, you know, a solution to help address loneliness for myself during COVID, I thought if she could if she could help me during COVID and keep me company, you know, imagine the impact that she could have for tens of millions of people around the world who experience, you know, the disconnection and isolation that I felt in COVID, but every single day. And so that's how the market... That's kind of how the the steps that led towards going into aged care. And I'd just... I'd gone to a few local aged care communities with Abi and just started talking to the staff and the residents. And exactly like I said before, just the early attachment to the industry really... You know, just having this appeal for Abi made me realize that this could be a really significant business in this market. And the other reason is, like, people aren't really building solutions for this space. You know, it's really unfortunate. It's not seen as a very sexy industry, and so people just aren't really thinking... Even people... I feel like the older adults are one of the most overlooked and forgotten generations. We're all gonna age, and we're all gonna get to that stage of life. And at that stage of life, you do need more support, unfortunately. And... Yeah. And like I said, no one's really building solutions for them, and so I noticed it was an industry that was desperately looking for a new model of care because more and more people are getting older and over the age of 65 every single day. And so it made sense to me that it was a market that even if it wasn't Abi, like, I'd be looking at building something else in this space because it's an industry that's perfect for new innovation with very little competition. Yeah.
00:40:11 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:40:11] S0: And tell me, how does that work? Most tech companies, when they think of aged care, they're thinking about software. Right? Whereas you're thinking of hardware and actually putting the robot, I guess, or the the human equivalent of a robot, the robot equivalent of a human into into the aged care space. How does that work in practice? So you sell them one unit of the robot and they buy that from you?
00:40:35 · Grace Brown
[00:40:35] S1: We lease at the moment. So we... So they lease a robot. Because Abi upgrades, we're upgrading her. There's a new generation almost every year. So they lease her on a yearly basis, and she comes into the home. She has a schedule and a roster just like staff would. She's part of the lifestyle and well-being community and activities. And so she has an... A mix of activities between group group activities and one on ones. In the group activities, she can do things like tai chi, dances, singing, language guessing games, trivia. It varies home to home. And then the one on one interactions completely depend on the individual. Some people love to tell Abi stories. Some people want Abi to tell them stories. Some people write poetry to her. Some people just wanna watch football with Abi, like, just have her next to them while they watch football or TV. And so it really varies, but we also don't force anyone to interact with Abi. That's something we're very deliberate about. It's just for the people who are curious, who are drawn to her, and that also changes over time. I'd say most people who spend a lot of time with Abi would describe her as either a best friend or a grandchild. And actually, in one of our in one of our company videos, there's this there's this woman who says that Abi is just very enchanting and that she tells her things that nobody else will ever hear. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of how she's integrated into the home.
00:42:00 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:42:00] S0: It so it sounds like she's got... She as an Abi has got the emotional intelligence. Like, this is a big top top of your conversation at the moment, right, is will AI ever have... Not that Abi is the traditional AI. I think yours is a bit more sophisticated than the AI we're using as consumers. But the topic of will AI ever have the emotional intelligence and the ability to read bias and to read cues in the way humans do. Touch on that for a moment, like, how have you incorporated that into the robots?
00:42:33 · Grace Brown
[00:42:33] S1: Well, that's exactly our bread and butter, and that's the part of the robotic stack and infrastructure that we build... That we're aiming to be really world class at. A lot of companies and a lot of the industry today naturally are focusing on physical intelligence, so things that can do manipulation, navigation, the dexterity, all of these mechanical applications for these robotics platforms. And there's gonna be a massive market for all of this. But as physical intelligence becomes more commoditized, what actually becomes more valuable is social intelligence. And I think a lot of the founders or developers in these spaces think that they're gonna build a robot that can functionally complete a task, and they have almost very little consideration of how this robot is going to interact with the people that it's sharing spaces with. As soon as you take a robot out of an industrial or warehouse setting, it's going to be in an environment... Any environment with a person is so unpredictable. We are one of the most complex systems that exists in nature and life. And so for a robot to be able to interact with us effectively, things like reading our body language, looking at our gaze direction, understanding previous interactions, and pulling on things from memories, all of these things, and there's many more, changes the context of an interaction that you have. And we, as people, do that very subconsciously. There is no part of the robotics stack that people are building that bring in that we call the social operating system. And that's the part of Abi that I actually believe is going to be incredibly valuable for Andromeda and for the entire robotics ecosystem in the future. So there's lots of founders. There's actually... I'd say the whole industry believes... Really believes that robots are gonna be part of everyday life and in every single environment that you can think of. We debate on the timing of that. Some people say it's two years away, particularly if they're raising, like, a billion dollars or something. Other people say it's more than a decade away. But regardless, I think we're all in consensus that robots are gonna be a very significant part of human life, and we're going to coexist with them. But I think each of these robots will need some equivalent of the infrastructure that is within Abi today, like that social operating system.
00:44:42 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:44:42] S0: Well, to connect it back to our earlier conversation on China, I've been told, like, in China, there's companies that have built robots that do cooking and cleaning and can fold clothes and a lot of that stuff, which I know in The US is a big focus where it's getting a lot of funding, where it's still at trial stage. But in China, it seems to still... It it seems to be... Have been adopted in industry. Right?