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This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news as it happened. Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
It is a Bloomberg Business Week, that is Carol.
Masser, I am you are, Tim Steneveek.
I think you don't know what man flu is.
Don't even go there. I'm not even going to do it, all right, Listen. We spoke earlier with Accentures carollly close about how AI and other tech will affect the workforce. But I really think about robotics robots in particular, they're going to.
Affect that because the big question is, you know, what about actual robots affecting the workforce?
Yeah?
What if I were a robot doing this? Yeah? Just a disembodied voice. Well, rich Tech.
Robotics lug you occasionally rich Tex Robotics as you wish. It's a publicly traded company that builds robots that clean, They make deliveries, They help with food and beverage preparation, and more. Clients include Hilton FedEx, Nike, and the Boston Red Sox. And we're also told, Carol, the robots are even friendly.
I gotta tell you, Matt, we've been excited to get to you and talk to you. Matt Cassella is president of rich Tech Robotics. He joins us from Newport Beach, California. Matt, it is really nice to have you here with us. Tell us about your company, the type of robots that you're seeing, and how AI might be changing, the type of robots in the future that you're going to be involved in.
Absolutely, thank you, Thank you very much for having me on today, Carol and Tim. First of all, I should probably say that robots do not get the man flu.
All right, all right, enough nice among many others.
No, we're really excited at rich Tech Robotics because we are a hospitality and service sector focused robotics in AI company.
And what that really means.
Is that our products, through a few different lines that we have, are the robots that really are going to be interacting with the general public. Right They're robots that people are going to see whether they walk into a coffee shop. Our barista robot Adam, which is a dual armed AI enabled robot.
Could be serving them coffee.
We have a variety of different on site delivery robots from our Matre D that would be available in restaurants, would be carrying the food from the kitchen to the dining room, or medbot which might be carrying pharmaceuticals from an on site pharmacy at a hospital up to the nursing stations throughout the facility, all the way through to our various cleaning products. So we're really excited about what's to come.
We just saw the coffee serving robot. I am wondering. Rian Nichol is now at Starbucks. He was very good about automating some stuff over at Chippotlan's cardline company Autoco.
Know.
Are you guys talk I mean, I am wondering how because they talk about just the mobile ordering and it's just a lot of ordering and it's hard for the baristas to keep up with it. Is Are you guys talking with Starbucks about helping them out?
You know, I can't.
I can't talk about any specific conversations that we're having, but we are very excited about continuing to explore some some paths into the coffee world right through a couple of a couple of different ways. And what you touched on there I think.
Is so Starbucks, Joe's coffee, Starbucks.
Well, we'll find you, know what, Carol.
I promise we'll find a coffee vendor near you so that we can put a robot as close to you as possible.
I will say, Matt, they're building an office for Brian Nicol and Newport Beach, so he won't be far from you if you do need to talk to him anyway.
Have you driven there lately?
He's there right now?
Have you emailed lately with him?
Matt?
Are consumers ready for this though? Are they ready to walk in somewhere and see a robot doing this? I mean, I think, Carol, you and I were out in l a year ago. I went to Newport No. I went to Santa Monica and they have these little delivery robots and I'm.
Like, this is kind of nuts. Yeah, on the sidewalk.
Yeah, I believe.
I really believe the consumer. The consumer is and it's it's because people are seeing them more and more throughout their lives. As you just pointed to, it's it's now, it's it's more common than not that when I'm talking with somebody they're referencing a robot that they've seen out out in the world.
Right, So I really believe people are working for it.
I think I want to go back to what Carol touched on earlier, that the ways in which we interact with food specifically, and how we order food and get our food, whether it's beverages like coffee or or your happy meal at McDonald's, right, all of those things are happening in different ways. We're ordering from our phone, we're ordering from a screen, and so what what really only matters is that we get our food hot, we get
our food consistent, the taste is delicious. Those are the characteristics really that people are focused on specifically when talking about food. So for me, I think it's really easy to understand that robotics and automation really can help with a lot of those things that are critical in the dining experience.
Matt, let's talk to BIZ because we have an investing audience. Whenever we have company CEOs come on, people want to hear about what's going on with the stock price.
We're Bloomberg.
We'd be remiss if we didn't ask about what's going on with your stock price shares down more than eighty percent so far this year. What, in your view is the market missing what's going on?
Yeah, I think it's the enormous opportunity that we have in front of us. I think, you know what you've seen, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Right, stocks are subject to the whims of the public market. So what we need to continue to do is tell our story about how powerful this opportunity in front of us is. The customers that we're engaging, the client the partnerships that we're forming both with end users and with suppliers.
Right.
So, as the big elephant in the room, right as Nvidia, we use a number of their products within our robots to help, you know, to help bring that AI to life, right, which which is which is a critical thing. Everybody's talking about AI and the power behind it, And I think that that comes in a couple of different ways, you know, for us, really it's how that AI will help the
customer interaction, the food production, et cetera. But also comes on how we're able to train robots so much quicker for any type of environment and really be able to get them, you know, trained to operate in new and dynamic ways.
So what moves the needle that you think gets investors more excited about the company because.
You know how it works.
I mean, you're you know, we've said this before with companies that are really small. I mean, we don't do a lot of venture conversations here too, of startups, but you know, it's a buck of share. It's not the typical conversation we have. So how do you get investors ex I mean, what's the potential here?
You know, the potential is continuing to fill these pipelines that we're that we're actively you know, growing right, and and I think the the important thing to remember is that we're still really at the infancy.
I touched on the idea that you know, people are starting to see robots out in the wild, but it's still we're still really really.
Early in this game.
And so for us, these are really really sticky sales. Right when we can start to build a relationship and build a partnership with our clients, Uh, they're going to become clients for a long time, right, It's not going to be a one time sick. We're really positioning ourselves.
And I was listening a little bit to your early conversation, and you touched on recurring revenue, right, we are we are building our business to be a robot as a service business, right because that's why that's going to give our customers the confidence to partner with us that their robots will be will be there working for them well into the future, right, and that will continue to show us that smooth recurring revenue that investors will you know, all right, very a track.
Well, look forward to checking in with you in the future. Macsella, he's president of rich Tech Robotics.
This is Bloomberg, Okay, Carol.
Since the twenty twenty two mid terms, about eight million members of gen z have joined the electorate. It's a demographic shift that's quote unprecedented. This is according to Henry Elkis, the founder and CEO of Helena. It's a nonprofit group. It recently helps support a study from the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab that our team at Bloomberg News wrote about.
And by twenty twenty eight, this voting cohort is going to make up nearly twenty five percent of the electorate, meaning their voices on social and political issues could have a real impact on election outcomes.
All right, so listen up. Gen Z is right there and soon they are going to be powerful to help us understand the shift. Let's bring in Aaron Llewellyn. She is the CEO of Tilting Futures. It's a nonprofit that sends students. This is really cool. I kind of wish I was a student doing this on a three to four month overseas trips during gap years or even during college. Joins us right now from Oakland, California. Aeron, Great to
have you here on Bloomberg Business Week. Tell us little bit more about Tilting Futures, how it came to be, and what's the mission in terms of working with these students and sending them overseas.
Yes, I'm happy to thanks for having me so at Social Futures, our north star is really about equipping young people from all over the world with the skills they need to create meaningful social impact. And we've served thousands
of young people from about one hundred different countries. And the way we do this is we believe in experiential education, and we select a group of young people ages seventeen to twenty one, bring them together either to South Africa or Malaysia, and they spend several months together, living together in a global community, learning from social impact leaders in one of our two current theme areas, which are not going to be surprising, climate and human rights, something gen
Z cares very deeply about, and they do an apprenticeship with local leaders working in either of these two themes, really learning about how does social impact happen, what are my pathways for social impact? And then we wrap that entire experience with a curriculum that helps them kind of maximize the meaning out of the experience.
Aaron, do you think the sample of students who go on these incredible trips, I mean, these sounds awesome, awesome do you think, but do you think they're representative of the wider population? Because my thought, my first thought is, you know, somebody who seeks this out, you know, might have a bias toward those qualities that you bring up.
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I will say that we launched this new program with these themes and this really rooted and experiential learning learning from leaders doing social impact about a year ago, and the demand has been something we've never seen before. So I think that's a little nugget of information in there. So we've had seventeen thousand young people apply in one year for this
program and we just launched it. The organization's been around a while, but this is new and we've never had demand like that. And I think that speaks to seventeen thousand. I mean we served next year, we'll serve two hundred a year. We are doubling in size because we've got to figure out a way to get these kids off the wait list.
So you're harder to get into than the hardest colleges and universities.
I mean, we don't that's not something we're trying to grow so that we can meet demand. We don't want to be elite and you know, sort of hard to get into because we want to tap this spirit that we see in gen Z.
Can I ask you something, Why are you doing it?
Yeah? I think we're doing it because I think there's a there's a gap in between skills. So there's a gap of skills as it relates to what the future of work is going to require and what is being taught right now in a classroom, and we can bridge that by bringing together communities that are very different than
each other. They can be in dialogue with each other that when they don't agree for long enough to understand each other, they can do creative problem solving in ways that we don't typically see right now, a lot of
times we're not seeing they think. We teach systems thinking, so they're understanding how systems work together or don't work well to then think about how to get to the root of some of our challenges and why not take this appetite that gen Z has and give them the foundational skills to them go be able to realize the solutions that we need.
Before we pivot. I want to ask you, though, having said what you just said, well, then maybe we need to change education, whether it's high school, whether it's college, and maybe we need to rethink about I mean, you know what I'm saying, Like, if we're creating graduates who spend all this money on an education, especially at the college level, and yet, as you say, there's things that are missing that are kind of real life experiences and
kind of getting along, then maybe we've got a bigger problem.
I mean, I would say that there is a need for higher education. The academic components of higher education are necessary to create an educated society, but.
I'm just saying pulling something of what you guys are doing. And you know, it's not just the year abroad to go to Paris and Equissants and learn you know, use which cool. But I'm just saying something that's a little bit more productive and giving you some real life skills.
I completely agree, and that is where we're headed. We are working with colleges right now to try to figure out how do we embed something like this in the higher education pathway because study abroad is it's exactly what you said said, it's really a missed opportunity and there is a way to embed experience and community with people from very different cultures. That opens your perspective to what's possible that could be embedded in a higher education pathway and should be Aaron, do you.
See this at a time.
Like the backdrop of what's going on in the US right now and sort of a shifting view on America's role in the world is sort of move to isolationism that we're seeing from many members of Congress, this idea of the definition of America. How do you see that playing into what you're doing at the program?
Yeah, thanks for asking that, because I think about that almost every single day, and that's not just happening in the US. That's happening actually globally in many different ways.
And I think it's hard to have that viewpoint when you have had a form a of experience on the cusp of adulthood, before you've understood your identity, but while you're still forming it, and you've had an experience in a global community that made you understand that our challenges are similar, our approach to solutions will have similarities, they will have differences, our human needs are similar, and actually our problems our global in nature. Our biggest problems need
to be solved at the scale of the globe. And so to go and focus fully inward, I don't think you can do that when you've had an experience that's exposed you to the connections of what we're all experiencing right now.
Yeah.
No, it's a super super important point, especially as we are facing elections here in the United States, and I feel like over the last couple of years, we've seen this pushback on globalization or you know, populism if you will, you know, in nations around the globe. Having said that, I think there's sometimes that people think a younger generation or Gen Z ors. You know, they're checked out, they don't care, they're lazy, like there's there's some you know,
but they can vote. So hah, how should we be I don't know, thinking about them and some of the stereotypes perhaps that are labeled on this group.
Yeah, so the nihilism checked out, I just I don't buy it, And the research doesn't prove this out. So mckenzy just published something that speaks to this, I think so well. And this is in the workplace, but I think it translates into voting and into their lives generally. But they're entering the workplace. Remember gen Z isn't yet thirty, so they're still very junior in the workplace right now. But what they're demanding are three things. This is what
this study found. Purpose and accountability opportunities for people who are from underrepresented backgrounds and for people who come from diverse backgrounds, whatever that may be in the context. And then they want a rigorous commitment to sustainable business practices. And for me, the report said that gen Z is doing this more than any generation before it, and that's not checked out. That's actually the opposite of checked out.
And it's really holding us to a higher standard. And I think that's going to apply to this election too. They have a higher standard and I appreciate it, and I hope I can live up to it.
Andarin one thing that I wanted to ask about is the cost of these programs. Looking at the website, it looks like at least one of the programs is twenty one thousand dollars.
Am I getting that right?
Yeah?
That is the tuition price if you qualify to be a full pay student.
And what portion you do have a couple different financial aid options. Tell us a little bit about that, and sort of like how you're able to get students I don't want to call them kids, but how you're able to get people who don't come from families that are incredibly wealthy and able to afford intuition.
Such as this.
Absolutely, I'm very proud of this. But we are philanthropically funded by people who believe in this mission, and what they believe at their core is that this type of opportunity and learning experience is transformative, and our supporters and donors know that, and what they believe is that it shouldn't be reserved for the few, So about we have a mix, and we curate our classes and they are
from the economic They really run the economic spectrum. So about seventy five percent of our young people are on some type of financial aid, about twenty percent of them are on a full scholarship, and about you know, and then there's then they really run the twenty one thousand all the way down to full scholarship. So that's something
that we're proud of. And we have a mix. We need young people who can afford to pay for this to be going through these programs and having an experience that changes their mind and changes their perspective on the world and what they're capable of in the world, just like we need young people from a background where this would be unattainable without assistance, having the same transformational background, and that's a big piece of our mission.
He certainly gave us a lot to think about. Aaron, thank you so much for stopping by. Aaron Lewellen. She's the CEO of Tilting Futures, joining us from Oakland, California. So interesting stuff.
Really cool stuff.
Programs like this, we're not really on my radar. Really.
Yeah, I didn't do a gap year, did you definitely regret doing a year I did. Yeah, I did. I did a semester abroad.
I think everybody should do back years. I think it's a good thing, like like, get out there.
My brother did. They're very jealous, right, this is good