This is one in a series of posts with excerpts from our new fiction mystery book, The AI Analyst (click on badge on left to go to the Amazon page with description, sample download, reviews etc.)
At CES this week, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA showed his vision of the evolution of Digital Agents. Satya of Microsoft and Benioff of Salesforce have been talking up Agentic AI quite a bit, Jensen is thinking of the next evolution where agents don’t just focus on white collar tasks but also physical, blue collar and trade related.
I would like to introduce you to Barry Roman, a key character in the book and his company, Polestar. That is a next-gen tech vendor which combines agentic AI with humanoid robots, drones, UAVs etc. Not just a software or silicon focus. Polestar has an expansive definition of its verticals as each of the 800+ occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks. Their solutions automate limbs, eyesight and other human faculties, not just cognitive skills.
In a scene, before Barry presents, there is a slick video which show Polestar products on shop floors, hospitals, labs, delivery trucks, and warehouses. Barry then enters the stage led by one of his robots doing backflips, and another walking menacingly next to him as his bodyguard. Four drones they make fly into the audience, with two of them dropping music boxes at a couple of tables. When the boxes were opened, they played Lumiere and friends singing “Be Our Guest” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. One of the drones with sensitive mics amplifies the music, and the other with a high-resolution camera projects Barry and the bots on stage onto a large screen.
In a scene which did not make the final cut in the book, Barry becomes convinced about a focus on micro-verticals when he asks his team to bring in his father, a retired fireman, as an adviser while working with a fire and rescue customer. “Barry, all they have bought from you is some crew scheduling software. Give me a team for a week and I will show them technology a modern fireman uses and you could be selling in addition” That opened their eyes to wearable sensors, augmented reality, thermal vision glasses to allow firemen to see through smoke and fire, drones with sonic fire extinguishers to create acoustic boundaries to prevent wildfires from spreading, using AI to monitor imaging feeds from fires and so much more.
There is a scene where Barry visits the GE Global Research Center in Upstate New York and at lunch, he finds himself surrounded by chemical engineers, astrophysicists, and nuclear scientists. This was, of course, back in GE’s glory days, and the Center had over 1,500 technologists, many with PhDs covering every STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) discipline. He challenges his executives to build him one of those centers. He tells them: ‘I want us to be able to boast about Nobel Prize winners on our staff too.’ Of course, they had to manage his expectations—GE had 30 to 40 times more revenue than Polestar at that point.
Polestar is easy to do business with. Barry never fails to point out to his sales team how easy he had made it for retailers to contract their warehouse bots. “Not everyone is an Amazon and needs large distribution centers. We saw a growth in smaller warehouses located close to customer demand. I told Swanson (the CFO) to offer our bots as-a-service, and deliver as few as five as a start. Then seasonally we would deliver five or 10 or 15 more bots, as their customer demand spiked. Customers loved this flexibility, and it was one of our most successful product introductions.”
There is other discussion around LLMs, narrow models, KV cache in GPU RAM and other AI lingo. There is plenty of cyber crime in the book.
Don’t worry - it is a fast paced read with plenty of SV glamor and settings, not a geeky book. But read it to see that something like Polestar is not just fiction. Companies like that are being imagined and funded as we speak. Jensen, Marc and Satya’s vision is being given real life business context and ROI by someone like Barry.
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