Bots & Business

China stays ahead of foreign countries in the development of indoor delivery robots. Outdoor autonomous delivery vehicles on the other hand are produced in small quantities in China and have not taken on a sizable scale yet, according to a report by ReseachandMarkets.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.9 trillion in 2021, an increase of 6.2% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Worldwide IT spending declined 3.2% in 2020 as CIOs prioritised spending on technology and services that were deemed “mission-critical” during the initial stages of the pandemic.

Today the virtual trade mission between the Netherlands and France has started, focusing on cooperation in the field of AI. Mona Keijzer, State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Cedric O, the French Minister of Digital Affairs, will kick off this morning. An important goal of the trade mission is to arrive at a European response to the lead that China and the United States have in AI.

The market for autonomous navigation was valued at US$ 427.8 million in 2019 and is projected to reach US$ 796.0 million by 2027, a growth of 10.1% CAGR. This is in a large part due to investment in military research by governments, according to a report by ResearchAndMarkets.

This summer, Vasile Tiple was appointed Head of Legal Automation at UiPath, providing companies with the leading enterprise platform for automation. A logical step in his career, as he previously led the legal department of UiPath into the Legal Automation Program. A program of which he himself was a sceptic at first, but soon after the first repetitive process was automated, he became an ambassador for using robotic process automation (RPA) for legal work. Now he’s leading the industry into the legal automation era.

Collaborative robot solution manufacturers are leveraging the convergence of several enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine vision, and advanced gripping technologies in robots making them safe to work with thereby disrupting traditional robotic solutions as well expanding robotic use cases to laboratories, healthcare, semiconductor wafer handling, and assembly.

Cruise and General Motors on Tuesday announced they have entered a long-term strategic relationship with Microsoft to accelerate the commercialization of self-driving vehicles. The companies will bring together their software and hardware engineering, cloud computing capabilities, manufacturing know-how and partner ecosystem.

Without a doubt, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) was already on the radar of many UK businesses at the start of last year. Simon Perks, Head of Robotics and AI at a UK digital transformation consultancy called Agilisys, for example, claims to have been working pre-pandemic with a client that’s used the approach to cut the time needed to assess a claim from 15 days to just 24 hours–which means that whereas a person would previously need 12 minutes to process a form, their new virtual worker assistant is able to do it in three.

The majority of workers (nearly three-quarters) are open to having robot assistants help them with everyday work, and what’s more, many are interested in getting involved in creating bots, either by themselves or as part of larger teams. Workers’ needs sharply contrast with decision makers, however, who disagree with each other about whether there is a benefit to using robots across their workforce (42% agree vs. 58% that disagree).

Evros Technology Group has been delivering design, supply, implementation and IT infrastructure support services to clients for 30 years. Its offerings include managed IT services, cloud solutions, IT outsourcing, networking and security, technology recruitment, business continuity, and procurement solutions.