From conducting job interviews to vocational training, Swedish start-up sees robots as a game changer
- Furhat Robotics says there will be hundreds of uses for robots over the next two decades
- Only a few platforms will dominate the robotics industry, similar to Apple and Android in the mobile sector
If the future turns out to be just the way as envisioned by Samer Al Moubayed, robots will become part of our everyday lives, spawning huge business opportunities worth billions of dollars.
The CEO and co-founder of Furhat Robotics, a Swedish start-up developing robotic applications, says there could be hundreds of uses for robots, from conducting job interviews to vocational training to customer servicing worth billions of dollars in the next two decades. These robots will become so common that they will be used in schools, offices, hospitals and malls.
“If an application can accommodate a million robots, there is a market,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the Forbes Under 30 Summit Asia in Hong Kong last week.
“There will be hundreds of applications, each larger than US$1 billion … in 20, 30 years, there will be millions of [service] robots everywhere doing different things, but it is likely only one to three platforms will dominate [similar to] Apple and Android.”
Development of human-like robots began a few years before Stockholm-based Furhat was set up in 2014, when Al Moubayed was pursuing a PhD at the city’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology in speech technology.