Falling prices, use cases, market focus driving opportunities for channel around robots

Ashish Panjabi, COO at Jacky's Business Solutions.

Jacky’s Business Solution is an exclusive distributor for robotic solutions in GCC. Its brand portfolio includes Pudu, Softbank Robotics, Double Robotics, and Temi. It has selected brands and products that reinforce use case where the robot is a co-worker or Cobot.

Pudu robots are being used for food delivery in the hospitality sector. Softbank’s Pepper robot is targeted for education, government, retail, healthcare, telecom, and banking. Robots from Double Robotics are being used for telepresence in the work place, while a Temi robot can be set up to be a customised personal assistant.

There have been a number of drivers for the growing interest in robots. The first has been the pandemic, which has triggered the need for contactless solutions. The second is the push by regional governments for technology innovation. And the third is the falling prices for robots from $100,000 to $4,000.

For Jacky’s Business Solutions the priority market segments are healthcare, government, and education. These are the areas of focus but that does not limit sales to other areas. For universities, Pepper and Temi have a rich software development kit allowing students to build applications in Android and Linux and other development platforms.

The role of channel partner still remains important for selling into vertical markets. The channel partner understands those markets better than the manufacturer or the distributor themselves. Moreover, they understand the customer pain points and can select the most suitable solution to meet their requirements.

Ashish Panjabi, COO at Jacky's Business Solutions.
Ashish Panjabi, COO at Jacky’s Business Solutions.

Products and use cases

The Pudu robot is easy to operate and requires matching its inbuilt tray to the restaurant table. The navigation is automatic with collision and obstacle avoidance. The robot can save multiple profiles of delivery and its usage saves human time and cost.

It can carry up to 10kg of items to be delivered at the restaurant table and can run for 24 hours with its inbuilt battery. In this process it reduces human presence inside the restaurant.

Softbank’s robots can play various business roles including Brand Ambassador, Sales Associate, Lead Generator, Receptionist, Survey conductor, Edutainment, Service Provider, Loyalty Management, Adviser, Promoter, Interactive Kiosk.

Its inbuilt capabilities include Proactive Engagement, Speech Recognition, Face Recognition, Touch Recognition, Autonomous Navigation, Speak Multiple Language, Creates Emotional Empathy, Natural body language, Gender identification, Approximate Age identification, and Real time communication.

Temi robots can play various roles in multiple areas including Customer care, Virtual class, Virtual Doctor, Sales promoter, Way finder, Kiosk on wheels, Office Assistant, Elderly care. It can help in corporate meetings, sales promotion, monitoring of vital signs, UVC disinfection, temperature measurement, order delivery, and queue management.

The Double 3 robot is a two wheeled robot, that is self-driving and self-balancing and creates a physical presence of the remote worker in the workplace. The display panel has a unified pan and tilt movement, while its user interface displays objects in mixed reality.

The setup is through a standard web browser, and no IT skills are required to manage it or to make it operational. It requires 2 hours of charging and is able to run for 4 hours of operation.


Key takeaways

  • Pandemic has triggered the need for contactless solutions.
  • The prices for robots have fallen from $100,000 to $4,000.
  • For Jacky’s the priority segments are healthcare, government, education.
  • Pepper, Temi have a rich SDK allowing students to build applications in Android, Linux.
  • Role of channel partner remains important for selling into vertical markets.

The usage of robots is built around use cases in specific market segments that are best addressed by specialised channel partners with domain knowledge of those markets.