On this episode of Drones in America by MarketScale, host Grant Guillot was joined by commercial drone industry leader and Ware CEO Ian Smith.
Ware works to help companies automate their warehouse inventory via drone, leveraging the technology to bring increased performance, efficiency and accuracy to operations through effective data capture, processing and consolidation in a single system.
Smith, a licensed helicopter pilot, initially envisioned a lengthy career as a flight instructor. However, the financial crisis of 2008 pushed him down a new avenue that eventually led to drones, making him uniquely qualified to assess how the current situation surrounding COVID-19 has shifted the landscape of his current industry.
“My focus, today, is really zeroed in on warehousing supply chains,” Smith said. “The way we look at it in terms of how the drones are really helping in terms of COVID-19 is, especially in warehouses, humans have become a liability. There are a variety of reasons why we use drones in our product. … But, now, just having humans in a warehouse can spread a virus.”
There were trends toward robotics and automation in manufacturing and other industries, Smith said, but those trends have accelerated greatly in the wake of the pandemic as operations search for solutions that help eliminate the human element for critical jobs that can be automated.
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